The potential pitfalls of studying adult sex ratios at aggregate levels in humans.

ABSTRACT: Human adult sex ratios have been studied extensively across the biological and social sciences. While several studies have examined adult sex ratio effects in a multilevel perspective, many studies have focused on effects at an aggregated level only. In this paper, we review some key issues relating to such analyses. We address not only nation-level analyses, but also aggregation at lower levels, to investigate whether these issues extend to lower levels of aggregation. We illustrate these issues with novel databases covering a broad range of variables. Specifically, we discuss distributional issues with aggregated measures of adult sex ratio, significance testing, and statistical non-independence when using aggregate data. Firstly, we show that there are severe distributional issues with

SUBMITTER: Pollet TV 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5540859 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature