The Ecological Fallacy: Some Fundamental Research Misconceptions Corrected
Kevin J. Clancy Copernicus Marketing Consulting and ResearchPaul D. Berger and Thomas L. Magliozzi Boston University School of Management
The purpose of this article is to show how the ecological fallacy - a problem discovered by W. S. Robinson (1950) over five decades ago - is present to this day in a surprising number of commonly employed marketing and advertising research tools, seriously undermining their validity. Before Robinson, sociologists routinely used ecological studies to determine relationships. For example, it was commonly...