<p> Political Science 30: Political Inquiry Midterm Study Guide for Thursday, Aug 21</p><p>Bring Your Own Blue Books! But do not bring calculators, which will neither be permitted nor needed. You will have 60 minutes to complete the test. </p><p>Identifications. Be prepared to give a short description of some of the terms that I have defined in lectures, say why they are important, and give an example of each concept. You will have 5 minutes to do each identification.</p><p>The types of terms that we could ask you to identify include, but are not limited to: • External Validity • Hypothesis • Intervening Variable • Confound • Convenience Sample • Internet Poll • Temporal Order • Operational Definition • Treatment Group • Conceptual Definition • Random Assignment • Random Sampling • Internal Validity • Empirical Work • The Fundamental Problem of Causal Inference</p><p>Short Answers. These will focus on Jared Diamond’s “A Natural Experiment of History” and/or Gerber and Green’s “The Effects of Canvassing, Direct Mail, and Telephone Contact on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment.” For these readings, you should be able to answer questions like: a. What type of study is this? An experiment, a quasi-experiment, a natural experiment, or an observational study? b. Name one hypothesis that the author/authors test. What are the independent and dependent variables in this study? c. For this hypothesis, has the author shown that the temporal order is correct, there is a plausible causal mechanism, there is a correlation between the independent and dependent variables, and that there are no obvious confounding factors?</p><p>Data Question. I may give you a short data distribution, like the distribution of Los Angeles Laker salaries. For this distribution, you should be able to tell me what type of variable I’m using (nominal, ordinal, interval, or ratio). You should also be able to tell me what the mode, median, and/or mean are of the distribution. And if I ask you for the standard deviation, you should be able to write out the formula, show your work, and compute the standard deviation. </p>