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IJE Advance Access originally published online on January 28, 2009
International Journal of Epidemiology 2009 38(2):368-370; doi:10.1093/ije/dyn355
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2009; all rights reserved.

Commentary: ‘Is the Social World Flat? W.S. Robinson and the Ecologic Fallacy’

Glenn Firebaugh

Department of Sociology, Pennsylvania State University, USA.

E-mail: firebaug@pop.psu.edu

Accepted 9 September 2008

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

If the social world were ‘flat’ in the sense that it did not matter where you lived or with whom you associated—no place effects, no context effects, no contagion effects—then single-level analysis would do. The message of Subramanian, Jones, Kaddour and Krieger1 is that the social world usually is not flat, so multilevel analysis usually is called for. The idea that single-level analysis is problematic when there are multilevel effects is quite consistent with Robinson's classic warning about the ecologic fallacy.2 In fact, I suspect that Robinson himself would have embraced multilevel analysis had it existed in his day.

Because Robinson has had a multiplicity of interpreters, it is sometimes difficult to separate what Robinson actually said from a caricature . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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