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

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Publications (66)


Trends in Black-White Differences in Educational Expectations: 1980-92
  • Article

October 1996

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8 Reads

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79 Citations

Sociology of Education

Stephen L. Morgan

This article evaluates changes in social background, resource constraints, and labor market incentives as complementary explanations for differences in the educational expectations of two cohorts of Black and White high school students. Although improvement in social background can account for part of the aggregate between-cohort increase in expectations, relative direct costs and labor market incentives are necessary to explain the remaining increase, why Black students' adjusted expectations were higher than White students', why White students' expectations increased more than did Black students', and why the expectations of Black students of both cohorts were more likely to increase between the sophomore and senior years of high school.




Figure 1. The True Propensity for Hypothetical Example 3 as a Function of S 1 and S 2 
Table 2 . Estimated Conditional Expectations and Probabilities from a Very Large Sample for Hypothetical Example 1
Matching estimators of causal effects: From stratification and weighting to practical data analysis routines
  • Article
  • Full-text available

188 Reads

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10 Citations

Corresponding author: Stephen Morgan. Address and email above are correct. Phone number is (607) 255-0706, and FAX is (607) 255-8473.

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Should Sociologists Use Instrumental Variables?

101 Reads

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8 Citations

ABSTRACT Within the new literature on counterfactual causality, instrumental variables estimators have received substantial attention from both statisticians and econometricians.This article first reviews the classical and contemporary literature on instrumental variables, providing a running example drawn from the sociology of education. After this integrative review of the literature, a new IV application is offered, in an analysis of the Catholic school effect on achievement. The example demonstrates that even fallible IVs can be useful for examining patterns of causal effect heterogeneity. The article concludes with guidelines for the use of IVs in sociology. Should Sociologists Use Instrumental Variables? The language of empirical sociological research is changing. The use of counterfactual



Citations (54)


... The PO framework defines a causal effect based on a set of potential outcomes that could be observed in alternative states of the world (Rubin 1972(Rubin , 2005: the causal effect is the difference in potential outcomes across two states of nature ( Figure 1). The unobserved potential outcomes are counterfactuals (Morgan and Winship 2014). Counterfactuals, or well-defined alternatives to the outcomes that we observe in the world, are central to causal inference (Ferraro 2009). ...

Reference:

Foundations and Future Directions for Causal Inference in Ecological Research
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

... American optimism is disproportionately high considering the fact of limited upward mobility, especially for African Americans born into poverty (Alesina et al., 2018;Chetty et al., 2020). Survey research has also shown that while overt racial attitudes are on the decline, a significant share of White adults continue to hold racist beliefs (Bobo 2017), which are becoming more predictive of political behavior (Morgan 2022). The United States is not unique in this regard; similarly stark discrepancies abound across the Atlantic (Çankaya and Mepschen, 2019;Chauvin et al., 2018;Horton and Kardux, 2004;). ...

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

... Although a significance threshold of p < 0.05 has long been used in the social sciences and education research, there has long been disagreement about what the most appropriate significance level is (Benjamin et al., 2017). In the present study, a significance threshold of p < 0.01 was used for the regressions to obtain a better balance of Type I and Type II errors given the number of predictor variables being tested, the moderately large sample size (Murphy et al., 2014), and the exploratory nature of the current study. ...

Redefine statistical significance

... 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