Incremental Predictive Gain from Change: Quantifying Sources of Variance in Personal Culture

• In Event: Formal Models and Methods for the Study of Culture and Meaning (Co-sponsored by Sociology of Culture Section)

Abstract

The extent to which individual-level change contributes to aggregate differences in personal culture in a population remains a central question in sociology. Empirical research often focuses on the detectability or size of change, while many theoretical debates hinge on whether such change is substantively important relative to stable individual differences. This paper argues that researchers need a principled way to account for competing processes – stable baseline differences, systematic change, and unsystematic change – in the generation of cultural differences. It proposes a predictive framework, the Incremental Predictive Gain from Change (IPGC), that quantifies the relative contribution of these processes to aggregate variance. Using repeated measures of attitudes from the British Household Panel Study, we show how the IPGC clarifies the overall importance of systematic change and reveals heterogeneity across people and life-course stages. Across several questions, accounting for systematic change does little to improve our ability to predict unobserved responses. The results demonstrate how predictive evaluation can clarify long-standing ambiguities about the substantive role of within-person change among adults in producing aggregate cultural variation.

Authors

• Kevin Kiley, North Carolina State University

• Achim Edelmann, University of Bern

• Turgut Keskintürk, Duke University

• Stephen Vaisey, Duke University