Multilevel Modeling of Social Problems

Robert B. Smith (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1971) taught political sociology, research methods, and theory development at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  His research there focused on the social consequences of war, generalizations of path analysis, and computer simulations of social processes.  Since then, he has worked extensively in applied research.  His publications include articles on political and social processes, and on multilevel models bearing on human development.  He was the primary editor of the three volumes of the A Handbook of Social Science Methods, which link qualitative and quantitative methods, and he is the author of Cumulative Social Inquiry: Transforming Novelty into Innovation.  His recent research at the Cambridge-MIT Institute assesses student exchange programs and pedagogical experiments.  As senior statistician he worked on software for randomized trials, exact statistics, and Bayesian simulations at Cytel Inc., and is an advisory editor of Quality & Quantity.  He was a Fulbright lecturer in structural sociology at Ghent University, Belgium, and he has served as president of the Boston chapter of the American Statistical Association.  He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he directs his social structural research.

• Contents.- Preface and Acknowledgements.- List of Tables and Figures.- Overview of BookChapters.- Part 1, Introductory Essays.- 1.Contextual Analysis and Multilevel Models.- 2.Stable Association and Potential Outcomes.- 3.Dependency Networks.- 4.Uses for Multilevel Models.- Part 2, Contextual Studies.- 5.Global Human Development.- 6.A Globalized Conflict.- 7.Will Claims Workers Dislike a Fraud Detector?.- Part 3, Evaluative Research.- 8.Target, Matched, and Not-Matched Schools.- 9.Using Propensity Scores.- Part 4, Research Summaries.- 10.Gatekeepers and Sentinels.- 11.Childhood Vaccinations and Autism.- 12.Conclusion: Gauging Causality in Multilevel Models.- Acronyms.- Glossary.- References.- Index.