Many students have grand ideas – e.g., about the role of class, social norms, political institutions, or gender in politics, society, or the economy – but they don’t quite know how to actually test these ideas in an empirical analysis. Often, the problem seems to be that they think they need to do something very complicated, similar to what “adult” researchers publish in academic journal articles. But this is wrong: Many big ideas can be tested with (relatively) simple methods. This blog shows how this works in practice and with open-source software (R).

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