Day 5 Logged--1:16
Day 6 Logged--1:45
Day 5 was great--I figured out the script for all the segregation indices and banged out everything I needed--exposure and dissimilarity indices for:
white-black
white-nonwhite
white-hispanic
black-hispanic
I then fell down a little rabbit hole on my tests because things weren't adding up--and then I realized it's because the Reardon dataset includes Tennessee, which I dropped because Tennessee didn't submit demographic data in 1990, so they don't have data for the full 20 year panel. I'm leaning towards just leaving them out, but I suppose can take a look at trying to append before the next phase.
What's the next phase? Well, it's actually doing some observations and starting to answer my research questions. And that's where the 6 year layoff since a real statistics class is starting to show. I can look at either the theory or the programming behind how similar analyses are done...and I understand about 25% of it. It's like reading a foreign language you studied in high school twenty years later--you understand enough to persist, but are largely baffled.
My gameplan is to go back to the very basics. I (embarrasingly) redefined my dependent and independent variables tonight, and am reviewing the basics on regression and panel data. I think it's foolish to try to modify or replicate analyses I can't understand, and I think in reality I'm only seeking to confirm what others have found already with regards to the segregation indices in the district under court-order. So my idea is to start from IV/DV and work my way up to a "Eureka" moment around how to run MY analysis.
So tomorrow night, instead of diving back into STATA, I'm diving back into reading around regression and panel data (Fixed Effects vs Random Effects) to start to get a better sense of what I really should be doing here.
Also, it's the weekend, so I had two cocktails while reading. Not sure if it was causal, but it was definitely correlated.
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