This blog describes an ongoing research project which uses both survey data (from the European Social Survey) and web-scraping (of Google News data via SerpApi) to understand how Irish attitudes to immigration have changed over the last two decades.

The Republic of Ireland has undergone significant social transformations in the last few years, and one of the reasons for this transformation is immigration. Up until now, survey data and questionnaires from repositories like the Central Statistics Office (CSO), Eurobarometer, European Social Survey (ESS), and other public data sources have been used for different observations and analyses for studying societal attitudes. These sources provide first-order data that are gathered through efficient sampling strategies, and they update their data regularly, highlighting different topics and subtopics for that particular year.

I will be blogging at https://brendanhalpin.net/blog/ from now on. Link to new post: https://brendanhalpin.net/blog/posts/omindel/

I will be blogging at https://brendanhalpin.net/blog/ from now on. Link to new post: https://brendanhalpin.net/blog/posts/parameterisingtwed

In an idle moment this afternoon, I wrote a Stata command.

It was to create a light-weight implemention of the “percentogram” described at https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/04/13/the-percentogram-a-histogram-binned-by-percentages-of-the-cumulative-distribution-rather-than-using-fixed-bin-widths/, and I like the result, but it struck me that it is a good example of how practical and useful it can be to engage in Stata programming. Also, it’s a good example of how writing code in Stata (in a programmable command language) is very different from writing code in a stats-capable programming language like R, Python or Julia.