Versta Blog Makes Public Opinion Quarterly

Versta Blog Makes Public Opinion Quarterly

This familiar sentence opens the lead article of Public Opinion Quarterly’s 2017 special issue on survey research: “Telephone surveys are dead, claim some survey researchers, and should be replaced with nonprobability samples from Internet panels.” Hmm, I’ve said something similar to that in the past, I thought to myself. I guess I’m not the only…

Data Geniuses Who Predict the Past

Data Geniuses Who Predict the Past

If there is one thing I hope you remember from your college statistics class, it’s this: Correlation does not imply causation. This is especially important to remember in our world of big data. Any large dataset will have hundreds of thousands of correlations, but most of those correlations will reflect purely random occurrences that mean…