Thanks for the responses to my earlier posted message re setting of priors. I am still working on my gender data (looking at gender, turnout and voting outcomes in NZ elections 1893-1954)- though take on board that the limited variation between the groups may reduce the reliability of existing ecological methods such as EI. As Stephen Voss suggested, I certainly did find that the Palmquist inflation factor was very large, and the standard errors were relatively high (eg:0.0147 for estimated Female turnout of 0.9014). What I have found since then is that the non-parametric version of EzI seems to be giving good results where I can compare them with the truth. eg: for the 1919 election the true values are Female aggregate turnout=0.792 (min 0.655, max=0.882) Male aggregate turnout=0.750 (min 0.539, max 0.871) and the estimates using the non-parametric version with defaults are BetaB (female) = 0.7760, 0.0166 BetaW (male) = 0.7661, 0.0157 I can slightly improve these estimates by shifting the defaults. My question is - has anyone else used the non-parametric version, and/or have any comments on its advantages and shortcomings? Once again, any pointers would be much appreciated as I am not a statistician and new to the area. Thank you. Linda Linda Moore Masters Student History Department University of Canterbury Christchurch NEW ZEALAND lmm72(a)student.canterbury.ac.nz - ei mailing list served by Harvard-MIT Data Center List Address: ei(a)latte.harvard.edu Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.hmdc.harvard.edu/listis.cgi?info=ei