2025/03/11 by Franziska Quoß, Lukas Rudolph · 1 voice · 9 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · #Astronomy #Climate change #Climate variability and models #Extreme weather #Geography #Geology #Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations #Meteorology #Natural (archaeology) #Oceanography #Operationalization #Physics #Precipitation Measurement and Analysis #Universe
paper · doi:10.1086/735706
published in The Journal of Politics 88(3), 1186-1201 (University of Chicago Press)
openalex publication_date 2025/03/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Natural or quasi-experimental research designs are based on exogenous variation, oftentimes requiring operationalization before use in statistical tests. For this, researchers regularly lack clear theoretical guidance and need to make threshold decisions. We show for three types of shocks—extreme weather, immigration exposure, and commodity price changes—that this leads to a vast menu of equally plausible measurements, which are used unsystematically in ensuing literatures. This hidden universe of operationalization decisions has consequences: Drawing on geocoded survey and weather panel data for Switzerland, we show that different measurements of extreme weather exposure exhibit vast statistical and geographical variation. Importantly, researchers can support arbitrary conclusions when using singular operationalizations, while, in our case, the whole set indicates robust null effects. These results highlight that measurement decisions induce relevant researcher degrees of freedom rarely made transparent. We consequently discuss how current practice could improve, concluding with a template and recommendations.