Middle Eastern Beliefs about the Causal Linkages of Development to Freedom, Democracy, and Human Rights

This paper investigates the extent to which people in five Middle Eastern countries endorse key beliefs of developmental idealism that associate development with freedom, democracy, and human rights. Developmental idealismis a set of beliefs concerning the desirability of development, the methods for achieving it, and its consequences. The literature suggests that these beliefs have diffused worldwide among elites and lay citizens and posits that when such beliefs are disseminated they become forces for social and economic changes. Although developmental idealism research has primarily examined family and demographic issues, developmental idealism has tremendous potential to influence other aspects of society. This paper extends knowledge by considering societal aspects not addressed previously in the developmental idealism literature: personal freedom, democracy, and human rights. Using survey data from Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, we investigate how publics of these countries associate development with these elements. We find that majorities believe development brings greater personal freedom, democracy, and human rights. Conversely, the data show that in four of the countries majorities believe more personal freedom contributes to development. These findings provide support for the idea that developmental idealism beliefs concerning freedom, democracy, and human rights have diffused to lay publics in these five Middle Eastern countries. We also find evidence of uniquely Islamic developmental models; a significant proportion of people in these countries believe that more religion will bring more development

Developmental Idealism: The Cultural Foundations of World Development Programs

This paper extends theory and research concerning cultural models of development beyond family and demographic matters to a broad range of additional factors, including government, education, human rights, daily social conventions, and religion. Developmental idealism is a cultural model—a set of beliefs and values—that identifies the appropriate goals of development and the ends for achieving these goals. It includes beliefs about positive cause-and-effect relationships among such factors as economic growth, educational achievement, health, and political governance, as well as strong values regarding many attributes, including economic growth, education, small families, gender equality, and democratic governance. This cultural model has spread from its origins among the elites of northwest Europe to elites and ordinary people throughout the world. Developmental idealism has become so entrenched in local, national, and global social institutions that it has now achieved a taken-for-granted status among many national elites, academics, development practitioners, and ordinary people around the world. We argue that developmental idealism culture has been a fundamental force behind many cultural clashes within and between societies and continues to be an important cause of much global social change. We suggest that developmental idealism should be included as a causal factor in theories of human behavior and social change

Twentieth Century Intercohort Trends in Verbal Ability in the United States

Vocabulary test score trends from the General Social Survey contradict the widespread conclusion that scores on standardized intelligence tests have systematically increased over the past century. We use a vocabulary test included in 20 nationally representative surveys administered since 1974 to test three hypotheses proposed to account for these trends, including changes in the formal measurement properties of the test, over-time changes in the meaning of education, and intercohort differences in exposure to words on the test. We find no support for the idea that test scores have declined because of changes in the structure of the test. Instead, our results show that education selectivity accounts for some cohort differences among prewar cohorts and that cohort-specific differences in exposure to words on the test account for nearly all variation in vocabulary scores of respondents born after 1945, suggesting different causal processes have influenced cohort verbal ability during distinct historical eras

Chinese and world cultural models of developmental hierarchy

Prior research on cultural models of developmental hierarchy finds broad cross-national agreement among publics about the rank ordering of societies on perceived level of development, based on an omnibus measure of development. In this research, I use a multidimensional index of world hierarchy derived from subjective evaluations of a large number of national attributes to explore dimensionality in Chinese perceptions of global hierarchy. Statistical analysis show that the data exhibit over time stability and strong association with objective measures of development and with alternate subjective measures of world hierarchy. Irrespective of the national attributes evaluated, Chinese respondents produced a very similar rank-ordering of countries on each of six different indexes. The Chinese model of world hierarchy shows broad overlap with the global hierarchy produced by raters from 19 other surveyed publics. Notable differences between Chinese and world cultural models of hierarchy include especially negative views of Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and India among Chinese respondents, and unusually favorable opinions of Russia, relative to the ratings of these countries by other publics. Analyses also show that respondents from 19 societies ranked China higher on the cultural dimension than on any other dimension but ranked the Chinese government lower than all but one country. Results suggest that scales based on an omnibus subjective measure of developmental hierarchy and indexes based on subjective ratings of national attributes produce a similar world hierarchy of nations.This is a manuscript of an article published as Dorius, Shawn F. "Chinese and world cultural models of developmental hierarchy." Chinese Journal of Sociology 2, no. 4 (2016): 577-608. doi:10.1177/2057150X16670832. Posted with permission.</p

An introductory guide to Data science: The terminological landscape

The emerging field of data science has rapidly evolved into an extremely diverse field equipped with multi-disciplinary techniques to extract, analyze and classify structured and unstructured data. These methods offer researchers, policy analysts, and the lay public evidence-based insights into a tremendous range of human, organizational, and societal activities on a scale and scope that has rarely been possible with conventional scientific methods. At present, however, the multi-disciplinary nature of the data science space suffers a ‘language’ problem insofar as data scientists from different fields often use different terms to describe common methods and concepts. The aim of the present research is threefold. First, we report results of a literature review that identifies and defines the essential content domain of data science, with special focus on the classification of data collection techniques. Second, we establish a preliminary set of relationships among the most trafficked terms of data science to facilitate interdisciplinary communication among scientists from heterogeneous fields. And third, we develop a classification scheme of web-scraping methods based on their availability, the quality of the data procured by the method, the ease of data extraction, reproducibility, the technical skills required to leverage each method, and the types of data collected by each method.This is a pre-print made available through Social Science Research Network: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2920842.</p