Measuring Subgroup Preferences in Conjoint Experiments

Conjoint analysis is a common tool for studying political preferences. The method disentangles patterns in respondents’ favorability toward complex, multidimensional objects, such as candidates or policies. Most conjoints rely upon a fully randomized design to generate average marginal component effects (AMCEs). They measure the degree to which a given value of a conjoint profile feature increases, or decreases, respondents’ support for the overall profile relative to a baseline, averaging across all respondents and other features. While the AMCE has a clear causal interpretation (about the effect of features), most published conjoint analyses also use AMCEs to describe levels of favorability. This often means comparing AMCEs among respondent subgroups. We show that using conditional AMCEs to describe the degree of subgroup agreement can be misleading as regression interactions are sensitive to the reference category used in the analysis. This leads to inferences about subgroup differences in preferences that have arbitrary sign, size, and significance. We demonstrate the problem using examples drawn from published articles and provide suggestions for improved reporting and interpretation using marginal means and an omnibus F-test. Given the accelerating use of these designs in political science, we offer advice for best practice in analysis and presentation of results.

Iconicity

Iconicity is a relationship of resemblance or similarity between the two aspects of a sign: its form and its meaning. An iconic sign is one whose form resembles its meaning in some way. The opposite of iconicity is arbitrariness. In an arbitrary sign, the association between form and meaning is based solely on convention; there is nothing in the form of the sign that resembles aspects of its meaning. The Hindu-Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3 are arbitrary, because their current form does not correlate to any aspect of their meaning. In contrast, the Roman numerals I, II, III are iconic, because the number of occurrences of the sign I correlates with the quantity that the numerals represent. Because iconicity has to do with the properties of signs in general and not only those of linguistic signs, it plays an important role in the field of semiotics—the study of signs and signaling. However, language is the most pervasive symbolic communicative system used by humans, and the notion of iconicity plays an important role in characterizing the linguistic sign and linguistic systems. Iconicity is also central to the study of literary uses of language, such as prose and poetry. There are various types of iconicity: the form of a sign may resemble aspects of its meaning in several ways: it may create a mental image of the concept (imagic iconicity), or its structure and the arrangement of its elements may resemble the structural relationship between components of the concept represented (diagrammatic iconicity). An example of the first type is the word cuckoo, whose sounds resemble the call of the bird, or a sign such as RABBIT in Israeli Sign Language, whose form—the hands representing the rabbit's long ears—resembles a visual property of that animal. An example of diagrammatic iconicity is vēnī, vīdī, vīcī, where the order of clauses in a discourse is understood as reflecting the sequence of events in the world. Iconicity is found on all linguistic levels: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse. It is found both in spoken languages and in sign languages. However, sign languages, because of the visual-gestural modality through which they are transmitted, are much richer in iconic devices, and therefore offer a rich array of topics and perspectives for investigating iconicity, and the interaction between iconicity and language structure.

Don Quixote, Sweded by Michel Gondry in Be Kind Rewind (2008)

In the spirit of poetic license from Be Kind Rewind (2008), this article argues that Michel Gondry’s film “swedes,” its playful neologism for ersatz remaking of Hollywood and classic films, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The feature follows the Sanchification of Jerry (Jack Black), Gondry’s Don Quixote, and Quixotification of Mike (Mos Def), Gondry’s Sancho, as they nostalgically wrong cinematic rights through sweding and try to save their working-class neighbourhood from condemnation and gentrification through community film making. Gondry swedes the Quixote through his engagement with major themes and operations in Cervantes’s classic, including nostalgia, story-telling, conflicts between reality and fantasy, authorship, the grotesque and carnivalesque, (anti-)heroes, race and gender-bending, genre, and addressees turned addressers. This article discusses Be Kind Rewind’s relationship to Hollywoodian and Cervantine classics through the theoretical frameworks of Julio Garcia Espinosa’s imperfect cinema and Foucauldian semiotics, respectively. Be Kind Rewind uses and abuses Hollywood stereotypes to re-purpose them for a critique of discriminatory practices. Where casting is concerned and where Michel’s characters diverge from Miguel’s, Be Kind Rewind advances that skin colour is not an arbitrary sign and that race has historical and contemporary meaning in intercultural interactions.

One generalization of Marchaud inequality onsignsensitive weights

At the proof of a classical Marсhaud inequality for equidistant moduli of continuity of the highest degree the reduction of their definition for arbitrary sign of a step of a finite difference to positive values of this step is used. In case of moduli of continuity with a weight such reduction reduces definitions of moduli of continuity to restriction. Consequently for determination of properties of moduli of continuity with a weight other approach of reasoning is required. Unlike usual weight signsensitive weight allows to consider not only an absolute value of an increment of function, but also a sign of this increment. In the work for metrics with signsensitive weight an analogue of Marchaud inequality on estimation of modulus of continuity of given degree over modulus of continuity of a higher degree is obtained.