have been modified in their more recent publications. Avoiding the ecological fallacy Researchers are said to commit the ecological fallacy when they make untested inferences about individual-level relationships from aggregate data. It is called a fallacy because it is based on the problematic assumption that relationships at one level of aggregation also hold at another level of aggregation. To illustrate, consider the fact that George Wallace, a four-term governor of Alabama and well-known segregationist who ran as a third-party candidate well in the 1968 US Presidential election, received a higher share of votes in regions with higher percentages of blacks. From this one might erroneously conclude that blacks were disproportionately inclined to vote for Wallace (post-election surveys showed that, while one in eight whites voted for Wallace, virtually no blacks did). Firebaugh has contributed to this literature by delineating theoretical conditions or rules under which it is possible to infer individual-level relationships from aggregate data. These conditions are important because researchers are subject to the ecological fallacy in virtually all the social and behavioral sciences - from history to political science to epidemiology – since individual-level data often are unavailable. Decomposing social change Books Prizes and awards Taiwan National Science Council Distinguished Lecturer, Academia Sinica, Taipei, 2005 Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, 2001 Best-Article Prize, Center for the Study of Inequality, Cornell University, 2001, for “Empirics of World Income Inequality” (American Journal of Sociology, May 1999) Lecturer, Zentrum fur Umfragen, Methoden und Analysen, Mannheim, Germany, 2000 Distinction in the Social Sciences Award, College of the Liberal Arts, Pennsylvania State University, 2000 Member, Sociological Research Association NIMH Fellow in Quantitative Methods, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN References External links Firebaugh's web page. Living people American sociologists Pennsylvania State University faculty People from Charleston, West Virginia Scientists from West Virginia University of Michigan faculty Year of birth missing (living people) American Sociological Review editors