Christopher DeSante
RESEARCH
Dissertation:
My dissertation uses universal human values (e.g. Schwartz 1992) to
predict political attitudes and candidate evaluations. Utilizing both
survey and laboratory data, I find that partisans and
ideologues are easily separable on recognizable psychological value
dimensions. Furthermore, polarization may be better understood through
the way in which political labels (i.e. "Republican" or "Liberal") are
understood as a function of abstract values.
Statistical Methods:
Recently I have developed a method for producing Monte Carlo
distributions of Cronbach's coefficient Alpha, which allows researchers
to more transparently conduct reliability analysis. The resulting R
package, mc.alpha, should be available on CRAN soon.
