Ecological Fallacy Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The ecological fallacy is a concept first introduced in 1950 by William S. Robinson in a paper published in the American Sociological Review. Through a statistical analysis of the relationship between immigration and literacy rates, he illustrates that we cannot extend patterns found at the aggregate level to make inferences about individuals. He finds that being foreign born correlates positively with a lower literacy level. At the aggregate level, however, he finds that the higher the population of immigrants in a state, the higher is the literacy rate in that state. His analysis illustrates that if we extend the findings at the aggregate level to the individual level, we would incorrectly conclude that a given foreign-born individual would be more literate rather than less literate.

In Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba warn against the dangers of the ecological fallacy and suggest that in general, if one is seeking to draw conclusions at the individual level, one ought to look at individual-level data. However, they do note that there are circumstances in which obtaining and analyzing data at another level of aggregation is useful, for example, when individual-level data are not available and when our theory has implications at more than one level of analysis. In these circumstances, they suggest, we can best determine the reliability of our theory by obtaining as much information as possible, at all levels of analysis. Gary King’s later (1997) path-breaking work deals with the problems of the ecological fallacy in more depth. In his book, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data, King demonstrates the inability of previous statistical models to accurately capture the impact of aggregate-level variables and introduces a new statistical model that is able to overcome some of the methodological problems associated with ecological inferences. King continues to argue (as he did with Keohane and Verba in 1994) that more information available to the researcher is better (at all levels of aggregation) as it can help to increase the robustness and reliability of our findings.

Bibliography:

King, Gary. A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.
King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.