Stephen L. Morgan’s research while affiliated with Harvard University and other places

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Publications (66)


Class Origins, High School Graduation, and College Entry in the United States
  • Chapter

February 2013

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24 Reads

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14 Citations

Stephen L. Morgan

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Jennifer J. Todd

This chapter analyzes data drawn from the National Education Longitudinal Study to assess the contribution of primary and secondary effects in creating class inequalities in the United States, considering both high school completion and the transition from high school to university degree. It also discusses the causal model underlying the primary-versus-secondary-effects distinction and explores alternative causal paths from social background to transition. Primary and secondary effects are both present in the United States, as in other countries. The chapter regards the causal identification challenges to be sufficient grounds for caution in interpreting differences between what-if transition rates from these models as causal quantities that reflect choice-based secondary effects.



Introduction

January 2013

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32 Reads

In disciplines such as sociology, the meaning and interpretations of key terms are debated with great passion. From foundational concepts (e.g., class and structure) to more recent ones (e.g., globalization and social capital), alternative definitions grow organically from exchanges between competing researchers who inherit and then strive to strengthen the conceptual apparatus of the discipline. For the methodology of social inquiry, similar levels of contestation are less common, presumably because there is less scope for dispute over matters that many regard as mere technique. The terms causality and causal are the clear exceptions. Here, the debates are heated and expansive, engaging the fundamentals of theory (What constitutes a causal explanation, and must an explanation be causal?), matters of research design (What warrants a causal inference, as opposed to a descriptive regularity?), and domains of substance (Is a causal effect present or not, and which causal effect is most important?). In contrast to many conceptual squabbles, these debates traverse all of the social sciences, extending into most fields in which empirical relations of any form are analyzed. The present volume joins these debates with a collection of chapters from leading scholars.


Handbook of Causal Analysis for Social Research

January 2013

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659 Reads

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151 Citations

What constitutes a causal explanation, and must an explanation be causal? What warrants a causal inference, as opposed to a descriptive regularity? What techniques are available to detect when causal effects are present, and when can these techniques be used to identify the relative importance of these effects? What complications do the interactions of individuals create for these techniques? When can mixed methods of analysis be used to deepen causal accounts? Must causal claims include generative mechanisms, and how effective are empirical methods designed to discover them? The Handbook of Causal Analysis for Social Research tackles these questions with nineteen chapters from leading scholars in sociology, statistics, public health, computer science, and human development.


The Consequences of International Comparisons for Public Support of K–12 Education Evidence From a National Survey Experiment

October 2012

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26 Reads

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12 Citations

Educational Researcher

Candidates for public office in the United States frequently justify their positions on education policy priorities by stating the need to strengthen the nation’s economic competitiveness against new global challengers. In this article, the authors investigate the consequences of this form of policy motivation for attitudes toward and support of public schooling in the United States. Using a national survey experiment where a two-question prime on international competitiveness is randomized across respondents, the authors test for differential responses to attitude items that have been included regularly since the 1970s in the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll and the General Social Survey. The results suggest that framing educational policy with the goal of enhancing international competitiveness lowers subjective assessments of the quality of local schooling without increasing interest in additional spending to improve the nation’s education system.


Models of College Entry in the United States and the Challenges of Estimating Primary and Secondary Effects

June 2012

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29 Reads

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52 Citations

Sociological Methods & Research

In recent work in the sociology of education, the primary effects of stratification are defined as the effects of social class origins on preparation for future educational attainment. The secondary effects are then the net direct effects of social class on the transition to the next higher level of education, which are interpreted as average effects of class conditions on students’ choices. In this article, the standard model of primary and secondary effects is laid out in explicit form, and primary and secondary effects are then estimated for college entry among recent high school graduates in the United States. The challenges of estimating these effects for educational transitions in the United States are then explained, focusing on the weak warrant for causal inference that is used to justify the calculation of counterfactual net differences across classes. Alternative estimates of associational primary and secondary effects are then offered, after which the prospects for the identification of causal secondary effects by conditioning on additional confounders are assessed. In conclusion, an appeal is made for attention to the policy-relevant patterns of heterogeneity that research on primary and secondary effects may be able to reveal, and a case is made for elaboration and direct identification of the presupposed choice mechanism that has been assumed to generate secondary effects in past research.


Structural earnings losses and between-industry mobility of displaced workers, 2003–2008

November 2010

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30 Reads

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39 Citations

Social Science Research

This article investigates structural sources of earnings losses in the U.S. labor market, analyzing data from the Outgoing Rotation Groups and Displaced Worker Supplements of the 2003–2008 Current Populations Survey. After introducing the data and methodology, a descriptive model of inter-industry earnings differentials in the full labor market between 2003 and 2008 is presented to motivate a baseline claim that industry of employment represents a salient partition of the distribution of good and bad jobs over this time period. Then, the current wages of two groups of workers in 2006 and 2008, who were displaced from their jobs in the prior 3 years, are modeled. Earnings losses of re-employed workers are analyzed, conditional on re-employment in alternative industries, while simultaneously adjusting for observed determinants of selection into employment. The findings demonstrate that displaced workers who are then re-employed suffer from earnings losses in their new jobs. These losses are larger among those who switch industries, especially among those who move to traditional low-wage industries in the service sector. The losses are also larger for those who held their prior jobs for 3 or more years, and they cannot be explained away by differences in the skill requirements between the jobs from which individuals are displaced and those in which they are re-employed. The findings are discussed with reference to structural theories of labor market inequality from sociology and economics, which represent valuable complementary perspectives to individualistic skill-based accounts of earnings differences.


Patron-Client Relationships and Low Education among Youth in Kano, Nigeria
  • Article
  • Full-text available

April 2010

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106 Reads

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8 Citations

African Studies Review

Based on an analysis of original social network data collected from 407 households in an urban community in Northern Nigeria, this article evaluates whether patronage relationships between households have consequences for children's educational attainment. A "social resources" perspective suggests that patronage ties may serve as a form of social capital that activates upward social mobility for entire families, thereby yielding more than simple transitory returns on social connections. An alternative "social constraints" perspective suggests that patronage ties may have no effects (or negative effects) on the schooling of clients' children, since patron-clientage reflects prevailing social inequalities and exists for reasons other than the promotion of dynastic mobility among clients and their families. In the case study reported in this article, the latter pattern holds, and the results are interpreted with reference to the historical record, which shows that a latent function of patron-clientage is the preservation of intergenerational status immobility.

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Citations (54)


... Testing for differences between group means is highly relevant in psychology and related disciplines. Especially when an experiment has been conducted where a randomization procedure guarantees that participants are similar to each other regarding all background variables, a simple comparison of group means is adequate to estimate the causal effect of treatments (Morgan & Winship, 2015). In such scenarios, the t-test has been firmly established for a very long time to compute differences between group means and provide not only p-values but also confidence intervals for inference (Cressie & Whitford, 1986). ...

Reference:

Same or Different? Comparing the Coverage Rate of Five Different Approaches for Testing the Difference of Two Groups Means
Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research
  • Citing Book
  • December 2014

... In other words, by design, the APC-I method does not estimate the kind of linear or nonlinear cohort effects in traditional APC models because the latter's assumption that cohort effects can occur independently and additively of age and period effects lacks theoretical grounding and is thus arbitrary and questionable. 2 Our questioning of the validity of the accounting framework is not new (Hobcraft et al., 1982;Holford, 1983) and has been echoed in recent methodological work (see, e.g., Morgan, 2022;Morgan & Lee, 2021;Neil & Sampson, 2021). ...

A double-diamond retrospective on modeling change in attitudes and opinions
  • Citing Article
  • October 2022

Social Science Research

... Although there is clearly a relationship between political party and orientation, they are different con- cepts as both the Republican and the Democratic Party are composed of a variety of ideological camps and coalitions (Noel, 2016). 2 All models include controls for factors commonly associated with views of capital punishment. We operationalize racial animus with a measure of symbolic racism (see Morgan, 2022). Respondents were prompted with the following: "Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. ...

Prejudice, Bigotry, and Support for Compensatory Interventions to Address Black–White Inequalities: Evidence from the General Social Survey, 2006 to 2020

Sociological Science

... In other words, by design, the APC-I method does not estimate the kind of linear or nonlinear cohort effects in traditional APC models because the latter's assumption that cohort effects can occur independently and additively of age and period effects lacks theoretical grounding and is thus arbitrary and questionable. 2 Our questioning of the validity of the accounting framework is not new (Hobcraft et al., 1982;Holford, 1983) and has been echoed in recent methodological work (see, e.g., Morgan, 2022;Morgan & Lee, 2021;Neil & Sampson, 2021). ...

A Rolling Panel Model of Cohort, Period, and Aging Effects for the Analysis of the General Social Survey
  • Citing Article
  • November 2021

Sociological Methods & Research

... Although previous studies showed that the STEM attrition rates were higher among women than among men (Bieri Buschor et al., 2014;Weeden et al., 2020), we did not find that STEM workforces shrank more among women than men. Our results show that among the LEHMS and the white-collar STEM careers, there were comparable shrinkages in both gender groups, and that the women bluecollar STEM workforce maintained its size. ...

Pipeline Dreams: Occupational Plans and Gender Differences in STEM Major Persistence and Completion
  • Citing Article
  • June 2020

Sociology of Education

... Moreover, a substantial part of the literature has highlighted that conspiracy beliefs and mentality is favoured by pathological factors such as anxiety, paranoia and schizotypy as well as political factors such as perceived powerlessness and anomie (see Goreis & Voracek, 2019). Political science research conducted in the United States even points at specific elements of local cultures that favour the emergence of conspiracy beliefs, such as a paranoid style among mass opinion (Oliver & Wood, 2014) or ethnic prejudice (Morgan & Lee, 2019). ...

Economic Populism and Bandwagon Bigotry: Obama-to-Trump Voters and the Cross Pressures of the 2016 Election

Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

... However, the empirical disentanglement of the relative importance of the factors behind these two hypotheses is not easy, as witnessed by the sharp confrontation between Mug and Morgan in 2018 about the possible explanation of Trump's victory (Morgan, 2018b(Morgan, , 2018aMutz, 2018aMutz, , 2018b, and more generally by the series of works by Colantone and Stanig (2018c. This study aims to investigate the reasons for the rise of abstention and the success of left-wing and rightwing populist parties in Italy, relating electoral results to demographic and socio-economic factors. ...

Correct Interpretations of Fixed-effects Models, Specification Decisions, and Self-reports of Intended Votes: A Response to Mutz

Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

... Political speeches in various settings were the subject of this research. Some have examined the US presidential speeches in the context of the "War on Terror" narrative (Rashidi and Souzandehfar 2010;Sarfo and Krampa, 2012;Morgan, 2018) and the US election campaign speeches (Rahimi et al., 2010;Wang, 2010). Other studies have examined political speeches in Pakistan (Memon et al. 2014;Iqbal, 2013) and Africa (Alo, 2012). ...

Status Threat, Material Interests, and the 2016 Presidential Vote

Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

... An intraclass correlation coefficient test (Two-way random effects, absolute agreement, single rater/measurement: ICC (2,1)) was performed to determine the reliability and repeatability of the linear distances ( [51,54]. To prevent false significant comparisons due to the small sample size [55], statistical significance was set at 5% (p ≤ 0.05) and 0.5% (p ≤ 0.005) [56]. ...

Redefine statistical significance
Daniel Jacob Benjamin

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James Berger

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... Among our controls are five demographic characteristics. Support for Trump is often shown to be higher among voters who are White, male, older, religious, and less educated (e.g., Morgan & Lee, 2018;Tyson & Maniam, 2016). Race and gender are potentially as fundamental to shaping world view as personality. ...

Trump Voters and the White Working Class

Sociological Science