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    C H A P T E R 2

    Measurement Counting the Biggel-Balls

    Whenever someone tells me “I love statistics,” my gasp of surprise is inevitably followed by the discovery that the individual is a baseball fan. I can understand the enthusiasm. I have fond memories of sitting in Wrigley Field on a warm, sunny afternoon, scorecard in hand, keeping track of the stats for that day’s game. But I’ve never been enough of a devotee to tabulate the numbers that most fans follow during the season: home runs, runs batted in, batting average, slugging average. Apparently, collecting statistics originated with a reporter, Henry Chadwick, who gathered data on outs, runs, home runs, and strikeouts in order to measure how valuable different players were to their teams. It was natural that he would begin collecting the data he calculated. One of his major concerns was that data be collected in a uniform way so that baseball players could be compared legitimately.1

    Like Chadwick, as a statistician, my question is always “Where do the numbers come from?” In baseball, like most sports, the record keeping is done in accordance with a pre- scribed set of rules. A runner will never be able to claim the record for the fastest mile on an informal neighborhood sprint. The mile needs to be officially measured, the speed has to be observed by an unbiased timer, and the run has to take place in an approved race. Similarly, baseball statistics are collected in official ways during Major League games using a form very similar to the one devised by Chadwick a hundred years ago.

    Although we usually hear numbers reported with an attitude of acceptance that they “just are,” actually collecting the information is not always such an obvious process. This was brought home to me when my children were little and I ended each day by reading them Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book. I interspersed my reading with many fake yawns because, as everyone knows, “A yawn is quite catching, you see. Like a cough. It just takes one yawn to start other yawns off.” As a tired mother, I hoped that as my children “caught” my yawns, they would also assimilate my exhaustion and fall asleep. But as a statistician, the page that always caught my attention pictured an enormous counting device:

    Counting up sleepers . . . ?

    Just how do we do it . . . ?

    Copyright ©2015 by SAGE Publications, Inc. This work may not be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means without express written permission of the publisher.

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    Really quite simple. There’s nothing much to it.

    We find out how many, we learn the amount

    By an Audio-Telly-o-Tally-o Count.

    On a mountain, halfway between Reno and Rome,

    We have a machine in a plexiglass dome

    Which listens and looks into everyone’s home.

    And whenever it sees a new sleeper go flop,

    It jiggles and lets a new Biggel-Ball drop.

    Our chap counts these balls as they plup in a cup.

    And that’s how we know who is down and who’s up.2

    As I read that page each night, I’m not sure which I was most amazed by: the device that could listen and look into everyone’s home, or the chap who could count up to ninety-nine zillion nine trillion and three each night by the time my children had fallen asleep. But those are precisely the initial tasks of any statistician: first, identifying the cases, and sec- ond, counting them.

    In this chapter, we will begin our exploration into statistical analysis by looking at mea- surement. The first step is identifying our cases—who (or what) is it we are actually study- ing? Second, we need to pinpoint the attribute of those cases that we are interested in studying—how can we measure it? Third, we need to evaluate our measurement of the attribute to make sure that it reflects what we are trying to study. Fourth, we record that measurement before we finally enter it into a database preparatory to analysis. As with all chapters in this book, this chapter will conclude with a description of how to use this con- cept to answer a political question.


    Like the Biggel-Ball chap, the U.S. Census Bureau is tasked with two Herculean feats every ten years: The Constitution requires first that they find every person living on U.S. soil and, second, that they count them. It’s really not simple, and there’s quite a lot to it.3 The two- fold process of finding and counting U.S. residents has evolved and expanded for the past two centuries. The first stage of the census requires enumerators to identify all U.S. resi- dents. When the first census was taken in 1790, U.S. marshals were sent around their dis- tricts, tasked with visiting every home and recording the name of each head of household along with the number of members in the household. They wrote down this information on whatever paper was available to them, made two copies, one of which they sent on to Washington for counting and one of which they posted in a public place in their jurisdic- tion for all to inspect. It wasn’t until 1830 that the government provided the enumerators with standard forms on which to record the required information. The U.S. marshals


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  • CHAPTER 2 Measurement: Counting the Biggel-Balls 19

    retained responsibility for filling out these forms until 1880, when enumerators were hired specifically for the purpose of completing the census. Their task of finding each individual became easier in 1890, when the enumerators were issued maps of the roads they were assigned to cover. It became easier still in 1970 after U.S. postal workers were tasked with compiling an address register of all addresses in the United States. That same year, the U.S. Post Office also eased the workload of the enumerators with the institution of mailed ques- tionnaires rather than personal visits. The task has eased further in the past two censuses with the availability of Internet and phone responses. Of course, the increased clarity of the process still doesn’t change the fact that the population of the United States has increased from 3.9 million counted in the 1790 census to 308.7 million counted in the 2010 census. That is a lot of people to find, even with simplified processes. Somehow, in 2010, they were able to complete this first part of the process in two months.

    The second part of the process, counting all the people identified during the enumera- tion, is even more time consuming. Originally, all those handwritten lists had to be tallied by hand. As the population of the United States increased, the time it took to count it increased as well. Although standardizing the forms helped the counting process, by 1870, counting the 39.8 million inhabitants by hand proved to be impractical. As a result, the chief clerk of the Census Office invented a basic counting machine to ease the problem. But even with the device, the magnitude of counting to 50.2 million in 1880 took seven months to complete. One of the employees of the 1880 census, Herman Hollerith, left that job to invent a more sophisticated device that could not only count, but also cross tabulate variables. His invention used cards based on those used by the Jacquard loom. Each individual identified in the census had a corresponding card with various holes punched in it to identify charac- teristics about the individual—age, gender, and so on. In the long run, Hollerith cards, with their eighty-column format, went on to become the basis of modern computers, and Hollerith’s company went on to become IBM. But in the short run, Hollerith rented his counting machines to the U.S. Census Bureau for the 1890 census, allowing them to com- plete their marathon count up to 62.9 million in a record six weeks. The use of the first non-military computer in 1950 further helped the process. And the 1960 advent of optical scanners connected to bubble-coded responses helped further. But even with the sophisti- cated technology, the 2010 census took nine months to count.

    As with the Biggel-Ball chap and the census, the first step of any analysis is to identify the cases in question and to find a way to measure them. For example, in the waning days of the 2010 lame duck Congress, President Barack Obama was able to get the Senate to ratify the New START Treaty with Russia. The issues raised in it echoed the issues raised by arms control treaties negotiated beginning in 1969. On the surface, it was relatively easy to negotiate a conceptual agreement that both countries be limited to the same number of nuclear weapons. In practice, though, measuring the number of nuclear weapons proved difficult. Much of the difficulty originated in the Soviet preference for weapons with mul- tiple warheads, in contrast to the U.S. preference for single-headed missiles. As a result, the Soviets had fewer weapons but more total warheads than the United States. Before the two nations could agree on a treaty, negotiators had to agree on a definition of what constitutes a single nuclear weapon. Similarly, as we study political events, we need to clearly define our unit of analysis—what or who we are studying.



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