Session 4 – From country-years to a model

The claim is about countries in years, and the data arrive as respondents, so the first thing the module does is explain what aggregation to the country-year gains and what it loses. The rest of the session fits the same claim four ways and reads each output line by line, then takes apart the measurement decisions behind the outcome.

Work through	What you do	Timing
The statistical methods behind the course	Section 1: why the predictor is measured at the country-year, and what a cell mean is a mean of.	20 minutes
The statistical methods behind the course	Sections 2 and 3: a first linear model read output by output, then what cluster-robust standard errors correct and what they leave unchanged.	60 minutes
The statistical methods behind the course	Sections 4 and 5: two-way fixed effects, random effects, and why a within-country comparison and a between-country comparison are answers to different questions.	60 minutes
Weights	The three decisions that go by the name ‘weight’: design weights inside a cell, precision weights across cells and population weights across countries, taken apart on the course panel, with C6HJR’s published coefficient refitted under every combination. Only one of the three changes the estimand.	45 minutes
Missing answers	What a respondent who mentions no frame at all does to a share built from mentions, the rules that the menu offers for them (score zero, drop, split, impute), and how multiple imputation, run with two different packages, compares on this case with the other three rules.	60 minutes
The items behind the scales	The instrument behind every outcome on the menu, taken apart: which items form which scale, how they hang together, whether the answers recover the published four dimensions and what the two composites gain, and what that means for the frame set and the scoring rule you are about to choose. Run the exploratory analysis yourself from the correlation matrix supplied with the module.	45 minutes
Binary outcomes	One item of the battery as the outcome: a logit and a probit side by side, odds ratios against average marginal effects, errors clustered by country-year and a random intercept, and the national unemployment rate on a single item with and without fixed effects. For a group that built the respondent file, every model on the page is refitted in class.	60 minutes

By the end of the session you have one rendered document containing the same claim fitted under four estimators, with a sentence under each fit naming what that estimator assumes.