sociology department rankings: now with added legitimacy
So, where should you go to find sociology rankings? The NRC? Ahahahaha. U.S. News and World Report? Perhaps, if you also need to catch up on AARP-related news and events. Google, however, shows there’s a new player in the game:
OrgTheory is your source for Rankings
So there you have it. And if you search for sociology department rankings you’ll find OrgTheory-related material in the first and third hits, with US News managing 2nd (for now) and NRC back somewhere in the dust.
We’ve now gotten about 65,000 votes on the rankings page Steve and I set up. Steve has done some initial analysis of the rankings, too, including this visualization of the rank order as a network where ties are defined by having an overlapping 90 percent confidence interval. The image and the data used to make it can be seen on his site.
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January 12, 2011 at 10:01 pm
So in Steve’s cool graph, I’m guessing the horizontal dimension has meaning regarding rank, but the vertical doesn’t? Is that right?
brubineau
January 12, 2011 at 10:22 pm
or is rank just something like linear distance along the snake?
brubineau
January 12, 2011 at 10:25 pm
So, now, stepping back, I’m curious — 1) how do those rankings compare to NRC (or other rankings), 2) does the crowdsourced ranking (that’s a lot of votes!), sorta, meet a basic test of reasonableness (surprises, weird anomalies?), 3) if an “objective,” non-biased expert (whoever that is) looked at the rankings, what would they say?
(Steve: I like that graph.)
teppo
January 12, 2011 at 10:27 pm
Thanks! I think it’s kind of neat, too. Yes, the linear distance along the snake is basically the rank, although if you want the actual rank confidence intervals I used, you can get the spreadsheet that contains them at the link Kieran posted above.
Teppo: especially once you consider the overlapping confidence intervals, I think the ranks look pretty good. In principle, it wouldn’t be hard just to estimate some kind of measure of association between the NRC ranks and these ranks just to check…
Steve Vaisey
January 12, 2011 at 10:34 pm
The snake looks a lot like NRC 1990s, but would be a bit different than NRC 2010. Numerically, the overall rank correlation is ok, but the network would be structured different. A few NRC 2010 schools have enormous confidence intervals, so you then get the top and bottom of the snake connecting. Also, some key schools are in very different positions.
fabiorojas
January 12, 2011 at 10:43 pm
amazing how there’s a near separation of the top-tier from the rest of the system (bridged only by Yale) and how you have to go about 2/3 of the way down the pecking order before it turns into a big mush.
gabrielrossman
January 12, 2011 at 10:56 pm
Gabriel: That’s exactly what struck me the most about this. My wife called it “the head of the dragon.” What I like most about this is looking at each school’s “ego network” (which is easier in UCInet than looking at a jpeg). I find the ego networks for all the schools I’ve looked at pretty plausible.
Steve Vaisey
January 12, 2011 at 11:57 pm
I like the fact that Toronto’s finally been ranked. One of my favorite departments!
Omar
January 13, 2011 at 12:04 am
Here is my favorite Excel graph for those of us who think that networks are pretty, but sometimes confusing (just the top 40).
Omar
January 13, 2011 at 12:40 am
It looks to me like the top of the scores is getting squeezed down while the bottom is being pushed up (the range used to be 91-8, and now it’s 87-15). I wonder if the growing popularity is adding a larger proportion of random noise to the scores.
Andrei Boutyline
January 13, 2011 at 2:06 am
Just a comment on the use of google search. Note that google searches may be based on your personal browsing history:
https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?hl=en&continue=https://www.google.com/history/welcome%3Fhl%3Den&nui=1&service=hist&srr=1
“Get the search results most relevant to you.
Web History helps deliver more personalized search results based on the things you’ve searched for on Google and the sites you’ve visited. You might not notice a big impact on your search results early on, but they should steadily improve over time the more you use Web History.”
Someone else’s google search of these terms might reveal a different rank order or results.
KatherineKChen
January 13, 2011 at 4:10 pm
Note that google searches may be based on your personal browsing history
Yes, I know. I don’t use Web History anyway, but when I do stuff like this I use a copy of Firefox or Chrome that’s not my default browse and that’s not logged in to any google account. Of course, they might be tracking it anyway (or tailoring it some other way) but I was aware of this pitfall when I took the screenshot.
Kieran
January 13, 2011 at 4:42 pm
Interesting that the (rank-ordered) results are so similar to U.S. News and World Report (at least for the top 20). Did you guys use any of Matt’s neat respondent modules to collect info on the people doing the ranking? Even some basic demographic info would be potentially interesting (e.g. Age).
christopherbail
January 13, 2011 at 6:09 pm
No. We don’t know anything about the people except for their geographic location.
Steve Vaisey
January 13, 2011 at 6:27 pm
And how many votes they cast, which may be an indicator of some psychological relevance.
Kieran
January 13, 2011 at 6:44 pm
@chris: You can check here (http://blog.allourideas.org/post/2739358388/download-your-data) to see exactly what data the idea marketplace creator can download.
Matt Salganik
January 15, 2011 at 6:03 pm