论文标题
顺序结果的差异差异:应用大规模枪击对枪支控制态度的影响
Difference-in-Differences for Ordinal Outcomes: Application to the Effect of Mass Shootings on Attitudes toward Gun Control
论文作者
论文摘要
当反复观察随着时间的流逝而重复观察时,在观察性研究中广泛使用差异差异(DID)设计。但是,几乎所有现有方法都假定潜在结果(平行趋势假设)并靶向添加剂效应。然而,在社会科学研究中,许多感兴趣的结果以序数量衡量。这使线性假设不合适,因为两个序势结果之间的差异不是很好的定义。在本文中,我提出了一种方法,以绘制DID设计下的序数结果的因果推断。与现有方法不同,所提出的方法利用潜在变量框架来处理结果的非数字性质,从而基于对潜在连续变量的分位数的假设来识别和估计因果效应。本文还提出了基于等效性的测试,以评估额外的预处理期间可用时关键识别假设的合理性。提出的方法应用于一项研究,估计大规模枪击事件对公众对枪支管制的支持的因果影响。我几乎没有证据表明统一向亲枪支控制政策转变,如先前的研究所示,但发现效果集中在十多年来第一次射击的左倾受访者身上。
The difference-in-differences (DID) design is widely used in observational studies to estimate the causal effect of a treatment when repeated observations over time are available. Yet, almost all existing methods assume linearity in the potential outcome (parallel trends assumption) and target the additive effect. In social science research, however, many outcomes of interest are measured on an ordinal scale. This makes the linearity assumption inappropriate because the difference between two ordinal potential outcomes is not well defined. In this paper, I propose a method to draw causal inferences for ordinal outcomes under the DID design. Unlike existing methods, the proposed method utilizes the latent variable framework to handle the non-numeric nature of the outcome, enabling identification and estimation of causal effects based on the assumption on the quantile of the latent continuous variable. The paper also proposes an equivalence-based test to assess the plausibility of the key identification assumption when additional pre-treatment periods are available. The proposed method is applied to a study estimating the causal effect of mass shootings on the public's support for gun control. I find little evidence for a uniform shift toward pro-gun control policies as found in the previous study, but find that the effect is concentrated on left-leaning respondents who experienced the shooting for the first time in more than a decade.