"Prove It With Figures" displays some of the tools of the social and statistical sciences that have been applied to the proof of facts in the courtroom and to the study of questions of legal importance. It explains how researchers can extract the most valuable and reliable data that can conveniently be made available, and how these efforts sometimes go awry. In the tradition of Zeisel's "Say It with Figures," a standard in the field of social statistics since 1947, it clarifies, in non-technical language, some of the basic problems common to all efforts to discern cause-and-effect...

This is author-approved bcc. If it is too long, delete the last sentence in each of the biographies. THE BELL CURVE by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, a best selling book published in 1994, set off a hailstorm of controversy about the relationships among IQ, genetics, and various social outcomes, including welfare dependency, crime, and earnings. Much of the public reaction to the book was polemical and did not focus on the details of the science and in particular on the validity of the statistical arguments that underlie the books's conclusions. A detailed understanding of the...

Ordinal Data Modeling is a comprehensive treatment of ordinal data models from both likelihood and Bayesian perspectives. Written for graduate students and researchers in the statistical and social sciences, this book describes a coherent framework for understanding binary and ordinal regression models, item response models, graded response models, and ROC analyses, and for exposing the close connection between these models. A unique feature of this text is its emphasis on applications. All models developed in the book are motivated by real datasets, and considerable attention is...

In social science research, differences among groups or changes over time are a common focus of study. While means and variances are typically the basis for statistical methods used in this research, the underlying social theory often implies properties of distributions that are not well captured by these summary measures. Examples include the current controversies regarding growing inequality in earnings, racial diferences in test scores, socio-economic correlates of birth outcomes, and the impact of smoking on survival and health. The distributional differences that animate the debates in...

Expert testimony relying on scientific and other specialized evidence has come under increased scrutiny by the legal system. A trilogy of recent U.S. Supreme Court cases has assigned judges the task of assessing the relevance and reliability of proposed expert testimony. In conjunction with the Federal judiciary, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has initiated a project to provide judges indicating a need with their own expert. This concern with the proper interpretation of scientific evidence, especially that of a probabilistic nature, has also occurred in England,...

This book evolved from lectures, courses and workshops on missing data and small-area estimation that I presented during my tenure as the ?rst C- pion Fellow (2000-2002). For the Fellowship I proposed these two topics as areas in which the academic statistics could contribute to the development of government statistics, in exchange for access to the operational details and background that would inform the direction and sharpen the focus of a- demic research. After a few years of involvement, I have come to realise that the separation of 'academic' and 'industrial' statistics is not well...