Week 7 Blog- Beginning My Final Product and Complexifying My Analysis

I began working on my first draft of my final product this week. While I only made minor changes to my introduction and methodology sections so far, I was able to add a bit more information to my literature review through the additional sources I’ve read through in the past few weeks. One trend I noticed in recent sources published about the effects of the 2025 shutdown is that they are focusing on even more avenues through which the shutdown has impacted the economy, such as its impacts on public health, travel, business, and benefits. Reading these texts made me realize the massive scope of the 2025 shutdown and how the variables I am using to measure how households have been economically impacted are only a fraction of how many exist, which I plan to mention in the limitations section of my conclusion.

I also continued to work on the analysis of my data. To establish a stronger relationship between the shutdown and the variables I am measuring, I realized I need a stronger independent variable. Currently, I have only been using time, though I am aware of many potential confounding variables that may cause my dependent variables to exhibit a discontinuity during the period from October 1 to November 12 of 2025. I thought I would just have to accept this and mention this within the limitations section of my research paper, but I now believe I can find additional data on direct impacts of the shutdown, such as weekly federal employee furloughs, delayed or withheld federal payroll amounts, the number of agencies with lapsed appropriations, and the freezing of contractor payments. By regressing my dependent variables, which are more of secondary impacts of the shutdown against these immediate effects, I can establish a better relationship between the 2025 government shutdown and the major ways American households have been economically affected. It will take time for me to collect more data, but I believe once that is done, I can speedily conduct my regression analysis and complete the analysis and conclusion portions of my final product draft.