How to Deal with Missing Data and Galton’s Problem in Cross-Cultural Survey Research: A Primer for R

Eff, E. Anthon; Dow, Malcolm M.

doi:10.5070/sd933003305

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Consequently, biased results will be generated using either approach. Dow and Eff (2009) note that for the SCCS and other cross-cultural data sets, there will almost certainly be auxiliary variables available, in addition to the variables in a statistical model, that are correlated with the observed/not observed values of a binary indicator variable corresponding to any variable to be imputed, as is true for the present study. Since correlated (not necessarily causal) variables can be used as predictors of missing cases, both listwise and pairwise deletion will seldom be appropriate for cross-cultural survey research.…”

Section: Multiple Imputation Of Missing Datamentioning

confidence: 90%

“…These estimates were then combined to yield the final estimates using the rules described in Rubin (1987). Detailed discussion of these rules and empirical examples using cross-cultural data are given in Dow and Eff (2009a; 2009b) and Eff and Dow (2009) 3…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most are drawn from the SCCS. Prior to being combined into scales, each variable has missing values imputed using the auxiliary data set described in Eff and Dow (2009) as well as closely related SCCS variables. We generated eleven scales to operationalize the key concepts in our theoretical discussion 4 .…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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When one wife is enough: A cross-cultural study of the determinants of monogamy.

Dow

Eff

2013

Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology

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Multiple proposed determinants of the long-term historical shift in marriage preference from polygynous to monogamous unions are tested simultaneously using data on a worldwide sample of 186 pre-industrial societies. Since the diffusion of monogamy though conquest and population migration is well documented, we employ network autocorrelation regression models that include the cultural transmission of monogamy as an endogenous predictor variable. Linguistic and spatial transmission processes are found to be significant factors that jointly affect the worldwide variance of monogamy, while religious transmission processes are not significant, suggesting genomic variation may play a role in shaping the incidence of monogamy. Other significant factors are reduction of extrinsic risks due to pathogen stress and endemic violence, a highly articulated extrahousehold division of labor, and a beneficent environment, results which are consistent with female choice as a binding constraint in marriage decisions.

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Section: Multiple Imputation Of Missing Datamentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

When one wife is enough: A cross-cultural study of the determinants of monogamy.

Dow

Eff

2013

Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology

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“…A limitation with cross-cultural studies like ours is Galton’s problem: countries with shared cultural histories will not be fully independent in terms of other measures [127–129]. Whereas language phylogenies have often been used as a proxy for cultural proximity [128,129], this approach would not be appropriate for our framework because our units of cultural groups are ethnic groups, which often have different languages and other cultural attributes.…”

Section: Empirical Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Inequality between identity groups and social unrest

Houle

Ruck

Bentley

et al. 2022

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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Economic, social and political inequality between different identity groups is an important contributor to violent conflicts within societies. To deepen our understanding of the underlying social dynamics, we develop a mathematical model describing cooperation and conflict in a society composed of multiple factions engaged in economic and political interactions. Our model predicts that growing economic and political inequality tends to lead to the collapse of cooperation between factions that were initially seeking to cooperate. Certain mechanisms can delay this process, including the decoupling of political and economic power through rule of law and allegiance to the state or dominant faction. Counterintuitively, anti-conformity (a social norm for independent action) can also stabilize society, by preventing initial defections from cooperation from cascading through society. However, the availability of certain material resources that can be acquired by the state without cooperation with other factions has the opposite effect. We test several of these predictions using a multivariate statistical analysis of data covering 75 countries worldwide. Using social unrest as a proxy for the breakdown of cooperation in society, we find support for many of the predictions from our theory.

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Toward a theory of punctuated subsistence change

Ullah

Kuijt

Freeman

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Discourse on the origins and spread of domesticated species focuses on universal causal explanations or unique regional or temporal trajectories. Despite new data as to the context and physical processes of early domestication, researchers still do not understand the types of system-level reorganizations required to transition from foraging to farming. Drawing upon dynamical systems theory and the concepts of attractors and repellors, we develop an understanding of subsistence transition and a description of variation in, and emergence of, human subsistence systems. The overlooked role of attractors and repellors in these systems helps explain why the origins of agriculture occurred quickly in some times and places, but slowly in others. A deeper understanding of the interactions of a limited set of variables that control the size of attractors (a proxy for resilience), such as population size, number of dry months, net primary productivity, and settlement fixity, provides new insights into the origin and spread of domesticated species in human economies.complex adaptive systems | subsistence change | origins of agriculture | social-ecological systems R ecent work highlights that the transition from foraging to farming was nonlinear and heterogeneous (e.g., refs. 1-7). That is, rather than an inevitability, early shifts to food production were only one of many possible outcomes that could have been reached for a given set of dynamically interacting social and ecological variables. Although the forager-farmer transition is one of the most fundamental changes in human evolution, our understanding of the forager-farmer transition is theoretically fractious (1,(3)(4)(5)(6), with scholarly discourse dominated by the assumption that the forager adoption of domesticates was driven either by subsistence necessity or because domesticates provided a desirable opportunity or assurance. Given our adaptive flexibility, however, it is clear that both options are possible, depending on the situation. The challenge is distinguishing the contextual settings in which adoptions were linked to necessity versus opportunity. Simply put, there is currently no sufficient theory to explain the nonlinear and contingent worldwide transitions from foraging to farming.In this paper, we use concepts from Dynamical Systems Theory (SI Text S1) to model subsistence variation among contemporary ethnographic groups from an evolutionary perspective. We focus on a critical question: How can researchers use the concepts of attractors and repellors-so integral to understanding many nonlinear dynamical systems-to describe variation in the subsistence strategies of human societies? This framing provides general insights into why transitions from foraging to farming, at a global scale, exhibit nonlinearity and heterogeneity, and why the shift was sometimes gradual, and other times punctuated. Drawing upon comparative ethnographic case studies, we formalize the use of cross-cultural data in a theory-backed methodology to ascertain how the attractor/repel...

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How to Deal with Missing Data and Galton’s Problem in Cross-Cultural Survey Research: A Primer for R

Cited by 5 publications

References 16 publications

When one wife is enough: A cross-cultural study of the determinants of monogamy.

When one wife is enough: A cross-cultural study of the determinants of monogamy.

Inequality between identity groups and social unrest

Toward a theory of punctuated subsistence change

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