Page 63 - The Importance of Common Metrics for Advacing Social Science Theory and Research

The Importance of Common Metrics for Advancing Social Science Theory and Research: A Workshop Summary
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13034.html

INDICATORS 51

of unemployment rates for states and smaller areas, for which no reliable
sample existed. He expressed skepticism about statistical programs that are
generated from a political process.
The question of how to best use data collected from or generated by
transactions conducted over the Internet was raised by Christine Bachrach.
Are there research programs in place to evaluate the data, their use, and
their cost-effectiveness? What will be the implications of these data on
standardization?
Mulgan reported a dramatic change in the use of administrative data in
the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. These governments
have made commitments to make raw data available to the public as a de-
fault. This potentially transforms the relationship between administrative
and survey data. For example, the Australian government runs competitions
to see who can get the most cross-correlations, which would yield more
case-rich data.
Mulgan cited other examples of the co-evolution of policy and science.
One was the initiative in the United Kingdom to maintain a time-series
database of health education and other records for children mainly at risk
of poverty and social exclusion. The impetus for the initiative came from
the academic community in an effort to learn more about the life course,
protective factors, and risk factors, among others. The program is likely to
be terminated for political reasons and concerns about human rights and
privacy. Another example is the history of the unemployment rate in the
United Kingdom, which has undergone a range of treatments, from political
manipulation to a return to a theoretical measure of surplus labor supply.
Returning to the discussion of race, Mulgan gave the example of the large
Pakistani and Bangladeshi community in the United Kingdom that is call-
ing for identity through faith, not race. This has created a challenge for
the state as it tries to identify this community through a set of regressive,
semibiological racial terms.
Prewitt proceeded to discuss the political implications of classification
categories on surveys like the census. He used the example of how mul-
tiple races have been categorized in the decennial census. In 2000, when
people were allowed to choose more than one race category, the category
of “other” was not removed from the form (which had been on prior
census forms to allow respondents to indicate if they were of two or more
races). Even though “other” did not serve any theoretical purpose after
the mark-one-or-more option was introduced in 2000, it remained on the
form. Nearly half of the Hispanic population, mostly Mexican and Central
Americans, used the “other” category to identify their race. After the 2000
census, the Census Bureau decided that the term was not a good measure
and wanted to remove it from the form; however, a member of the House
Committee on Appropriations included in the budget the provision that the

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