Part 3 – Reproduction and the specification menu

Slides. Open the deck at this part in its own tab, or follow it on the slides page.

Part 3 begins with the reproduction, then takes the menu apart axis by axis to show what each choice does to an estimate, and ends with a round of exploration of your own.

Work through	What you do	Timing
Slides, the constrained task	The three Multi100 instructions read verbatim, what each assumes, the columns of the panel, and the aim of the reproduction.	10 minutes
Your working script, or Browser lab Task 3	Fit mcosmo ~ unemp_c with country and year fixed effects, which should give t = −3.804 (df = 233, N = 270), the value recorded by Multi100 for analyst C6HJR. Type your t without sending it, and send it when the facilitator says go. Then the question of why everyone in the class got the same t while five analysts, each writing their own code, did not.	20 minutes
Specification menu and slides	The axes you choose from, the three levels they sort into, what Task 2 of Multi100 left open, the ground rules for the menu and the claim-alignment convention that puts every result on one scale.	15 minutes
Slides, the methodological tutorial, with The statistical methods behind the course as the companion	Nine of the fourteen axes, a slide or two each: the six framing scales; building a scale from a mean, sum or share; claim alignment; a bounded scale in a linear model; the predictor, unemployment or GDP growth; predictor form; four ways to handle countries and years, and what fixed effects adjust for; the copredictor; sample restrictions; weights; and making the axes comparable.	25 minutes
Task 4 in the workspace or on the Browser lab, then Multiverse	Call try_spec() three or four times, changing one argument at a time, print them with my_experiments(), then submit the one you would defend with submit_exploration(). Your dot is drawn on the chart as an open circle.	20 minutes

By the end of the part you have reproduced t = −3.804, you can say what each axis of the menu does to an estimate, and you have an exploratory dot on the class chart.