My primary domain of interest is international or interethnic conflict. My work on conflict includes both armed conflict and discursive conflict. My past academic research in this field was often historical, but my ongoing projects and professional services also deal with current affairs.
Relatedly, I like to study why different groups of people reason and feel differently and the resulting normative problems in epistemology and ethics.
Last but not least, I have a fruitful secondary interest in the social determinants of mental health. I am particularly interested in the concept of resilience and how various social and developmental factors influence psychological resilience to acute stressors.
Due to my multidisciplinary educational background, I am trained in and have used three broad types of research methods: Quantitative, historical, and philosophical. I have taken research methods very seriously throughout my graduate studies, resulting in methodological contributions to quantitative methods (in the domain of multilevel modeling and causal inference) and historical methods (counterfactual reasoning in history and comparative history).
2024
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Hamas or Palestine? The Discursive Battle over the 2023 Israel-Hamas War and the Global Distribution of Partisan Search Interest - preprint
Tay Jeong, and Choong Kyo Jeong
SocArXiv, 2024
This study charts the discursive conflict over the 2023 Israel-Hamas War and estimate the global distribution partisan discourse in the initial month of the War. With the help of international X (Twitter) trends data, we identify two ideal types of pro-Palestine discourses, namely, a “humanitarian” kind focusing on “Palestine-the-victim” popular in a large portion of the world including the West and a “radical” kind broadly supported in the Muslim World characterized by an attention to “Palestine-the-hero”. Pro-Israel hashtag activism, on the other hand, paid overwhelming attention to Hamas with moral blame as the dominant emotive theme. Building on the finding that the topical foci between Palestine/Gaza and Hamas robustly discriminate pro-Israel and pro-Palestine discursive frames, we examine the ratio of Google search volumes between these topics throughout the world, which, unsurprisingly, strongly align with available cross-national opinion polls on the 2023 Israel-Hamas War. Overall interest in the War, the proportion of Muslims, and anti-American sentiment significantly predicted a pro-Palestine skew in online search interest.
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The Use and Disuse of Historical Counterfactuals in Process-and Contrastive Historiography: Insights from Causal Pre-emption [Revise and Resubmit at Sociological Methods & Research] - preprint
Tay Jeong
SocArXiv, 2024
Process historiography seeks to identify past events that led up to or brought about a certain outcome of interest. Contrastive historiography seeks to identify past occurrences without which the outcome of interest would not have occurred. Both can be theorized in the language of counterfactuals, but the practical necessity of counterfactual reasoning differs by each type in large part due to complications arising from causal pre-emption. Drawing on a recent version of the Halpern-Pearl account of actual causality, we explain the intimate relationship between the process- and contrastive modes of historiography while accounting for the seeming ease with which historians conduct the former based on knowledge of actual events alone. The theoretical distinction between process- and contrastive historiography has direct methodological implications for the practice of comparative history depending on whether it is sameness- or difference-explaining. We advocate a methodologically moderate approach to counterfactual reasoning in scientific historiography.
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Epistemic diversity and epistemic advantage: A comparison of two causal theories in feminist epistemology, [FirstView].
Tay Jeong
Hypatia A JOURNAL OF FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY, 2024
I reformulate the epistemic diversity thesis and the thesis of epistemic advantage as causal theories. Doing so considerably disambiguates the latter theory and allows for a more fine-grained comparison with the former. I suggest that the thesis of epistemic advantage be weakened in a way that preserves its insights about the downward rigidity of knowledge while avoiding the unpalatable theoretical, political, and prudential implications that it faces in its present form.
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Ethnic empowering policies and postcolonial political exclusion in the British empire: An analysis of ethnic police recruitment and communal legislative representation
Tay Jeong, and Choong Kyo Jeong
Nations and Nationalism, 2024
Based on the observation that the military and parliament were the two main sources of political power in decolonized states, we analyze how colonial empowerment in each domain affected ethnic groups’ odds of political exclusion after independence. A quantitative analysis of ethnic groups in former British colonies shows that martial but not legislative empowerment has a lasting effect, highlighting the importance the former in newly independent states.
2023
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Family economic status and vulnerability to suicidal ideation among adolescents: A re-examination of recent findings
Tay Jeong
Child Abuse & Neglect, 2023
According to the “differential vulnerability hypothesis,” individuals in adverse socioeconomic circumstances as less mentally resilient to stressful events. However, several recent papers radically challenged this hypothesis based on the accumulated literature on stress inoculation and presented cases in which lower-SES adolescents appear to be less vulnerable to suicidal ideation in the face of interpersonal aggression. We re-examine the link between psychological vulnerability to acute stressors and SES using yearly longitudinal public survey data from South Korea.We reaffirm the well-established finding that bullying victimhood strongly and consistently increases the odds of suicidal ideation (OR = 1.859, p < 0.01). However, we find no evidence in favor of the traditional “differential vulnerability hypothesis” or the recently proposed counterhypothesis.
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2022
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Cutting off the branch on which we are sitting? On postpositivism, value neutrality, and the “bias paradox”
Axel Berg, and Tay Jeong
Society, 2022
We offer a comprehensive review of “postpositivist” theories that reject the pursuit of value neutrality in the social and natural sciences. We argue that none is successful, and all such theories covertly return to the “positivism” that they claim to reject. We attribute this intellectual failure to a widespread blindness to the fact that the “positivist” ideal of value neutrality embodies the very principles of egalitarianism and democracy that postpositivist critical theories commonly subscribe to.
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A tale of two empires: Models of political community in British and French colonies
Matthew Lange, Tay Jeong, and Charlotte Gaudreau
Nations and Nationalism, 2022
Using a newly constructed index of colonial pluralism, we test the hypothesis that British colonial rule was more pluralist than French colonial rule. We then trace the different historical origins of the British and French models of political community. The British model was shaped by Britain’s experience with anticolonial movements in India, whereas the French model was influenced my political concerns in metropolitan France.
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Contextual fallacy in MLMs with cross-level interaction: A critical review of neighborhood effects on psychiatric resilience
Tay Jeong
Social Science & Medicine, 2022
1. In multilevel modeling, not partialing out the effect of the L1 variable induces contextual fallacy; 2. The concept of “contextual effect” can be extended to an interaction setting; 3. Merely including a cross-level interaction is highly prone to contextual fallacy; 4. Adding an appropriate L1-L1 interaction may improve the fit between theory and analysis; 5. I demonstrate through simulation and replication that past studies of neighborhood effects on psychiatric resilience offer little insight.
2021
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Do more stress and lower family economic status increase vulnerability to suicidal ideation? Evidence of a U-shaped relationship in a large cross-sectional sample of South Korean adolescents
Tay Jeong
Plos one, 2021
Existing research in health sociology conventionally assumes that living in a stressful or socially underprivileged environment reduces resilience to mental health problems. However, the burgeoning psychological literature on stress inoculation shows that too little exposure to adversity may also compromise resilience. An analysis of a large cross-sectional sample of Korean adolescents reveals that, consistent with the “inverted-U” theory, resilience to suicidal ideation is highest for those who report medium levels of chronic stress and who self-identify as having a medium level of family economic status.
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Communalizing colonial policies and postcolonial ethnic warfare: A multimethod analysis of the British empire
Matthew Lange, Emre Amasyali, and Tay Jeong
European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 2021
Communalizing colonial policies (CCPs) refer to colonial policies that governed the indigenous population based on communal membership. We hypothesize that discriminatory forms of CCPs strongly increased the risk of postcolonial ethnic warfare. A cross-country statistical analysis of countries in the former British empire supports our hypothesis: Discriminatory CCPs such as communal legislative representation and ethnic police recruitment had strong effects on postcolonial warfare while non-discriminatory CCPs such as census enumeration and indirect rule did not. We confirm our statistical findings through a historical case study of the Karens in Myanmar, paying attention to the historical significance of each type of CCP that we examine in the statistical analysis.
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The colonial origins of ethnic warfare: Re-examining the impact of communalizing colonial policies in the British and French Empires
Matthew Lange, Tay Jeong, and Emre Amasyali
International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 2021
We test the findings of the previous paper (listed right below) using a country sample that contains both former British and French colonies. We reaffirm the finding that discriminatory CCPs increase the risk of postcolonial ethnic warfare. We find no evidence that other types of CCPS, such as those that merely differentiate communities, increase the risk of postcolonial ethnic warfare.
2019
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미국은 북한 체제 보장을 약속했는가? 비핵화 협상 국면에서 한국 언론의 인용보도 왜곡 실태 분석 (Did the US guarantee the ‘regime’ of North Korea? A study of systematic citation errors in South Korean news media)
Tay Jeong, and Choong-Kyo Jeong
경제와 사회 (Economy and Society), 2019
We show that in the 2018-2019 US-DPRK negotiations, the term denoting the compensation to be paid by the US to the DPRK develops through three relatively distinct stages. After June 2018, which corresponds to the third period, all negotiating parties standardly used the term ‘security guarantee,’ with ‘the DPRK’ as its intended recipient. But how did South Korean media report on this term? Based on the observation that most reports arbitrarily quoted the term as “regime security guarantee,” we analyzed news articles from 24 major South Korean newspapers and news broadcasts. We also compare the citation accuracy of South Korean media to those of English, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian-language media and show that South Korean media are by far the least accurate.
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A Conceptual Appendix to “The Politics of Historical Knowledge”
Tay Jeong
Journal of Asian History, 2019
I respond to published criticisms of my 2018 article “The politics of historical knowledge,” which tended to engage in speculations of a covert normative message that purportedly underlie the predominantly descriptive arguments. I argue that the history of historiography of Korean antiquity strongly suggests that at least some works in the heterodox tradition have a legitimate spot in the rational reconstruction of scientific historiography. The subrational origins of modern scholarship call for more intellectual humility rather than a stricter policing of deviant theories.
2018
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‘사이비사학’ 비판을 비판한다 (A critique of criticizing “pseudohistory”)
Tay Jeong
역사비평 (Critical Review of History), 2018
This article expresses concern with the unprecedented attack on “pseudohistory” that this journal (Critical Review of History) presented in cooperation with dozens of professional historians in three consecutive issues. While acknowledging the harms done by some aggressive extra-institutional historians to professional research, I argue that using the term “pseudohistory” to refer to objects rather than ascribe a property to already demarcated objects has undesirable epistemic, prudential, and ethical consequences for the study of Korean antiquity.
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The Politics of Historical Knowledge: The Debate on the Historical Geography of Old Chosŏn and Lelang Commandery
Tay Jeong
Journal of Asian History, 2018
Since colonial times, modern scholarship of Korean antiquity always had a “heterodox” tradition that depicted a much more expansive scope of ancient Korean states and cultures than their “orthodox” counterparts. I present a detailed and up-to-date history of historiography of Old Chosŏn and Lelang Commandery that tracks the diachronic development of both traditions and how their boundaries shifted over time and interacted with each other. Close attention is paid to the influence of external factors as much as internal.
2017
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Korean Living Standards under Japanese Colonial Rule: A Critical Review of the Longitudinal Trajectory of Stature
Tay Jeong
Review of Korean Studies, 2017
Recently, some South Korean economic historians argued that historical height data reveals robust improvements in biological living standards of the Korean masses throughout the colonial period. However, upon careful examination, the available height data is most consistent with the previously influential thesis of an inverse U-shaped trajectory with its peak in the late 1920s / early 1930s. The historical trajectory of other notable indicators of biological living standards such as consumption, wage, and inequality also supports this conclusion.