This book provides a solution to the ecological inference
problem, which has plagued users of statistical methods for over
seventy-five years: How can researchers reliably infer
individual-level behavior from aggregate (ecological) data? In
political science, this question arises when individual-level
surveys are unavailable (for instance, local or comparative
electoral politics), unreliable (racial politics), insufficient
(political geography), or infeasible (political history). This
ecological inference problem also confronts researchers in numerous
areas of major significance in public policy, and other academic
disciplines, ranging from epidemiology and marketing to sociology
and quantitative history. Although many have attempted to make such
cross-level inferences, scholars agree that all existing methods
yield very inaccurate conclusions about the world. In this volume,
Gary King lays out a unique--and reliable--solution to this
venerable problem.
King begins with a qualitative overview, readable even by those
without a statistical background. He then unifies the apparently
diverse findings in the methodological literature, so that only one
aggregation problem remains to be solved. He then presents his
solution, as well as empirical evaluations of the solution that
include over 16,000 comparisons of his estimates from real
aggregate data to the known individual-level answer. The method
works in practice.
King's solution to the ecological inference problem will enable
empirical researchers to investigate substantive questions that
have heretofore proved unanswerable, and move forward fields of
inquiry in which progress has been stifled by this problem.
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