| Kevin Payne
University of Missouri
The problem of multiple levels in social inquiry: An application to educational policy analysis
FINAL REPORT:
"Levels" and "causes" are central to sociology, yet they remain ill defined. Theorists, methodologists, and data analysts have contributed to these issues, but have tended to do so in isolation. I bring them into dialogue to develop three contributions: a new meta-theory of levels and causes (resulting in a new resource mobilization theory), new technical methods for multilevel statistical models, and a study of the relation between economic advantage and student attainment generating ten major findings and illustrating the importance of new approaches to multilevel research. I identify a fundamental disjuncture between two types of causal process linking multiple levels -- transposable (aggregate) vs. intrinsic (emergent) -- reframing debates among groups such as reductionists and holists, objectivists and subjectivists, interactionists and structuralists, and quantitative and qualitative methodologists. This necessitates a new definition of "level" locating the distance between sociological observer and phenomenon observed in scale, medium, abstraction, commitment, and causal processes. It also requires a new definition of "causation" relative to these dimensions and the temporal frame of the study. New theories often demand new methods so I evaluate existing techniques for measuring, operationalizing, assessing, and interpreting quantitative multilevel data and suggest refined statistical procedures. To test them, I conduct a national study of the controversial relation between economic advantage and student attainment in American public schools. My analysis suggests both family and community economic advantages have independent effects operating differently in different contexts and populations. Further, these advantages condition the contributions of various cultural, social, human, and organizational resources to learning.
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