What To Do When You Can’t Pick The Data

by Heather Krause | Jan 22, 2021 | Analysis, Data Biography, Data Collection & Sourcing

BACKGROUND: We All Count asked you, our project members, for your experiences – both positive and negative – with situations where you can’t pick the data that you’re asked to work with. We heard about difficulties with poorly designed...

Proxy Variables Part 2: Race

by Heather Krause | Jun 26, 2020 | Analysis, Data Biography, Data Collection & Sourcing, Interpretation, Project Design

      This is part 2 of our examination of Proxy Variables, take a look at our introduction to the subject here. So, is race a proxy variable? Should we use race as a proxy variable? In depends. Sometimes.    In working we equity in quantitative...

Why We Need to be Data Detectives

by Heather Krause | Jun 7, 2019 | Data Biography, Data Collection & Sourcing

In last week’s email newsletter I mentioned Naomi Wolf’s data problems (That’s Naomi Wolf – not Naomi Klein as I accidentally wrote in part of the text. Apologies to Naomi Klein fans!) In Wolf’s latest book she makes claims about the number of men executed in...

Fresh Apples to Old Oranges: A case study in why data biographies aren’t only useful, they’re ethical.

by Heather Krause | Jan 24, 2019 | Data Biography, Data Collection & Sourcing

It’s not ethical to rank countries without giving us details on the data. It’s not equitable to rank countries on data from wildly different years. Where is the data biography for the new OECD Social Institutions and Gender Index? I do a lot of work in the area of...

An Introduction to the Data Biography

by Heather Krause | Jan 21, 2019 | Data Biography, Data Collection & Sourcing

2023 Edit: We have updated the Data Biography Template. The new version can be found here. I was once working with a dataset that had a variable called “Group Gender Composition.”  The options were “Men”, “Women”, or “Mixed.” I was doing an analysis of group process...