Carmine Scavo

Carmine Scavo, a professor of Political Science at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, has been working to familiarize college students with empirical data analysis for more than 25 years. Scavo, who along with Charles Prysby of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, developed “Voting Behaviors: The 2004 Election, the American National Elections Study Supplemental Empirical Teaching Unit in Political Science” (SETUPS), said exposure to empirical data can often be a shocking experience for students.

“Working with data can be a reality check for students because they tend to look at it through the lens of their life experience rather than taking it at face value,” Scavo said.

For their work in creating SETUPS, an interactive Web site for teaching social science methodology and voting behavior research, Scavo and Prysby won the 2006 Rowman & Littlefield Award for Innovative Teaching in Political Science from the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the 2006 Best Instructional Web Site from the Information Technology and Political Section of APSA.

SETUPS offers students the opportunity to analyze an accessible dataset drawn from the 2004 National Election Study (NES) online. The site presents a discussion of the background of the 2004 election and voting behavior in national elections, and exercises that explain how to analyze the data and understand the results. It includes about 160 variables, including party affiliations of voters, basic demographics, voter perceptions of candidates, and voter attitudes on issues such as foreign policy and civil rights. The resource is available through Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/SETUPS/.

The first SETUPS was initiated in 1972 with the support of APSA and ICPSR. Prior to 2004, SETUPS involved the development of a dataset archived by ICPSR and a monograph published by APSA. The interested faculty member would purchase the monographs from APSA and ICPSR would provide him/her with the appropriate number of data files. Depending on the era, the data were provided on tape, floppy disk, diskette, or CD-rom. Over time, SETUPS has become one of the most popular teaching tools used by professors to introduce university students to the methodology of social science, and the topic of voting behavior.

Scavo and Prysby have co-authored the SETUPS series since 1984 and the most recent version of the module, “SETUPS: Voting Behavior: The 2008 Election,” is also available on the ICPSR Web site, http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/SETUPS2008 . In 1994, Prysby and Scavo reformatted the SETUPS modules from 1972 to 1992 and made them available in a single file through ICPSR, http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR06572.

Professor Scavo said that knowing how to analyze data is an important skill to advance a student’s career. “Students need to be comfortable with data when they leave the university to be successful in graduate school or the work place,” he said. Scavo uses SETUPS in Intro to American Government and other lower-division classes to demonstrate how to read and use tables, charts, and graphs. He said modeling data use in these classes allows the student to see its importance and application.

In his department, students complete a two semester sequence of classes designed to support learning research and statistical methods that is required for students seeking a Bachelor of Science degree and recommended for those seeking a Bachelor of Arts degree. They are “Research Design for Political Science,” in which the students learn concepts and theories essential to research design, how to distinguish types of data and select appropriate measures to address political questions, and “Statistical Methods for Political Science,” in which they learn to apply scientific statistical methods to political and social problems. Scavo says “at the end of the second semester, the students know what they are doing with data and how it works.”

With a successful career in teaching and a well-respected data package that helps political science instructors bring data into the classroom to his credit, Scavo has a bit of advice for new and future social science instructors: “Be prepared to use data with your students.”

Professor Scavo earned his PhD in Political Science at the University of Michigan in 1986 and has taught in the Political Science Department of East Carolina University since 1985.

Inquiry-based Learning Webinar Now Available

ICPSR’s webinar on inquiry-based learning using resources from TwD is now available (WMV, 68.2 MB) for viewing. Slides (PPT, 3.1 MB) are also available. These files can also be accessed from TwD on the "About Us" page.

The webinar provides ways to integrate inquiry-based learning, which instructors continue to find promotes greater student interest and learning, into social science courses. The session is presented by Lynnette Hoelter, ICPSR’s director of instructional resources.

The teaching resources presented are easy to use and fit within almost any course structure.

ICPSR Summer Program courses open for registration!

ICPSR is pleased to announce the 2011 Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research with workshops and lectures on a wide variety of topics in research design, quantitative reasoning, statistical methods, and data processing.

• The First Session: June 20, 2011 to July 15, 2011, in Ann Arbor, MI.
• Second Session: July 18, 2011 to August 12, 2011, in Ann Arbor, MI.
• Three to Five Day workshops on both statistical and substantive topics will be held on various dates throughout the summer. Most of these shorter workshops will take place in Ann Arbor, but there are several that will be held in other locations: Amherst, MA; Bloomington, IN; Chapel Hill, NC; and Berkeley, CA.

Registration, fee structure, and further information about the ICPSR Summer Program are all available on our web site.

Please feel free to e mail us with any further questions at: sumprog@icpsr.umich.edu

Americans Remain Pessimistic About Their Financial Situations

A recent article featured on nytimes.com discusses the responses of Americans questioned in a Thomas Reuters/University of Michigan consumer survey. These responses suggest that, while Americans are becoming increasingly optimistic about the US economy at large, this optimism has not translated to their own financial situations. The figure below charts the responses to the questions from 1995 to 2010 and the current findings.

Among the more striking figures featured in this is that 53% of Americans feel that prices will rise more than their income and that they will be unable to keep up with inflation. However, according to this article, this figure is due more to worries about income rather than actual inflation as most expect prices to rise by only 4% or less. Another figure that suggests Americans are currently exceptionally pessimistic about their financial futures is that only 10% expect their income to rise by over 5%, as this is the lowest percentage recorded since 1978.

China's Economic Growth

According to a recent article by Nin-Hai Tseng on CNNMoney.com, China's recent economic strides are somewhat deceiving in that Chinese citizens still lag far behind those of other developed nations in terms of wealth. This is reflected in China's GDP and GDP per capita relative to the world's other large economies - the US, Japan, France and Germany. The following graph charts the climb in China's GDP relative to these four other countries. As the graph indicates, China recently surpassed Japan's economy, making it the second largest economy in 2010.

The graph below charts the same data except uses China's GDP per capita rather than GDP, taking its enormous population (approximately 1.3 billion) into account. As the graph indicates, China's GDP per capita is substantially lower than that of the US, Japan, France and Germany.

However, while it may be lagging far behind other developed countries, China's GDP per capita is growing quite rapidly in tandem with its GDP. From 2009 to 2010, it increased by 15% - going from $3,744 to $4,300. Furthermore, China is projected to surpass the US and become the world's largest economy by 2025, and GDP per capita will likely continue to rise with this growth.

SSDAN Hosts Webinar for Community College Social Science Faculty

This webinar, "Teaching with Contingency Tables for Community College Faculty," is scheduled for Wednesday, February 23, 2011, from 2:30 to 3:30pm (EST) and features our new and improved DataCounts! site and pedagogical applications of the WebCHIP 3.0 software. If you have ever wondered how to easily teach students how to interpret and manipulate U.S. Census data, then you are welcome to participate!

Led by Katherine Rowell, Director of Center for Teaching & Learning and Professor of Sociology at Sinclair Community College, Dayton, OH, participants will learn the value of teaching with data through contingency tables and the importance of fully integrating use of data analysis in the classroom.

Please register by Tuesday, February 21, 2011, at http://ssdan.net/?q=content/webinar-registration

Webinar on inquiry-based learning will feature TwD resources

If you’ve hit the point in the semester where your classes have fallen into routines and you’d like to spice things up a bit, this webinar is for you! Inquiry-based learning is becoming an academic buzz-word as instructors continue to find that this technique promotes greater student interest and learning. We will show how to use resources in TeachingWithData.org to bring inquiry into social science courses beyond research methods. (Maybe we’ll even slip in some hints about using it in methods/statistics courses as well!) Resources demonstrated will be easy to use and fit within almost any course structure.

The webinar in scheduled for Wednesday, February 23, 2011, from 1 to 2 pm ET. Registration is open for this webinar, which is free and open to the public.

Preschools Prefigure Non-White Majority

Most American three-year-olds are not non-hispanic whites for the first time in the nation's history, thanks to a wave of asian and hispanic immigrants and a rapid growth of the native-born black population. Eight states and DC now do not have non-hispanic white majorities in pre-primary education. Nationwide, less than than 59% of schoolchildren of any age. SSDAN and Brookings Institution demographer notes that these numbers prefigure a non-white majority across grade-levels. By sometime in the 2040s, America as a whole will cease to have a majority racial/ethnic group.

NB: Unlike "white," "black" or "asian", the Census doesn't define "hispanic" as a racial group but rather an ethnicity containing anyone with origins in a Latin American country regardless of race. Thus "non-hispanic whites" means those whites who do not identify as of Latin-American origin. No projection suggests that whites regardless of ethnicity will not remain the majority.

Extreme Poverty on the Decline

Charles Kenny from the Center for Global Development and the New America Foundation uses his weekly article in Foreign Policy magazine to point out that despite the persistance of crushing poverty, particularly in Africa, lives are getting better -- even for the poorest of the poor. For almost all of human history, most people everywhere lived on the brink of survival. About 200 years ago, things began to change for people in wealthy countries, mostly in North American and Europe, while living standards improved much more slowly in Africa and Asia. As late as 1981, half the world's population still lived on less than $1.25 per day. But in the last twenty years, growth has taken off in the world's poorest countries. GDP growth per capita has averaged 4.4% a year in the past decade in poor countries even as growth has been anemic in rich countries. For the first time since the industrial revolution, inequality between countries in decreasing (conversely long decreasing inequality within countries is increasing). This growth in poor countries has lead to a corresponding decrease in poverty. Researchers suggest that less than 15% of the people in the world now subsist on less than a $1.25 a day. China and India have, of course, been on the forefront of global growth. As a result, extreme poverty is now most heavily concentrated in Africa, where Brookings scholars suggest 60% of the world's poor people will live by 2015 (as recently as 2005, 66% lived in the much more populous continent of Asia). Yet, even in the long written-off continent progress is being made, albiet more slowly and more recently. Poverty is down 30% since 1995 and on pace to be halved over the period from 1990 to 2017 according to one study

Kenny acknowledges that the data he uses to support his argument are tenuous. Cross-national comparisons of wealth are difficult due to different price levels, and many underdeveloped countries cannot report accurate statistics for recent years. Furthermore, Kenny thrice cites single studies as definitive estimates (for a look at his estimate of halving African poverty over 27 years see this discussion from the World Bank). Still there is little doubt that his broader narrative is correct. More people live better now than ever before.