Ideas for Annual Conferences

Add more ideas or comment on the suggestions below by sending me an email or leaving a comment.

Policy-oriented conference ideas: planning around policy themes with multi-disciplinary interest and a quantitative focus:

• Citizenship, Immigration, Migration
• Justice
• Inequality
• Health
• Education

Broad methods conference ideas (OR simply a speaker series in causal inference):

• Causal Inference in different disciplines; see example of a workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference at Northwestern, 8-2010
• Survey Research, the future of

A&S Software Licensing

  I didn’t know this, so I’m passing it along to fellow A&S faculty.  All A&S faculty, staff and graduate students can get the following software installed on our personal computers, for FREE:  SPSS, SAS, SmartDraw, JMP, MatLab, and Qualtrics Survey Software.  Among  the many products that are part of the SPSS package, AMOS, is an excellent structural equation modeling (SEM) program. For a brief description of these packages see the SSTARS Center webpage here. Otherwise, check the web.  Simply contact the A&S Help Desk (support.as.uky.edu or ASHelp@uky.edu) to get the installation package and installation key.

Applied Statistics Laboratory (ASL)

     The Statistics Department (with the cooperation of the Biostatistics Dept.) will launch the Applied Statistics Laboratory (ASL), supported by Arts & Sciences and the Office of the Vice President for Research, with Arne Bathke (arne@email.uky.edu) as its director, to provide statistical consulting for the university. The SSTARS Center (i.e., Social Science Teaching and Research Statistics) will be integrated into the ASL.  One of the consultants, Xiafei Wang, a PhD student in Economics, will cover consulting on STATA issues. I have every confidence that Xiafei knows her stats and her STATA.
     The Applied Statistics Laboratory will not provide consulting for data management, which will be handled by UKIT. Many social scientists have a need for data management services to help them archive data they have collected (e.g., with ICPSR) and post it to their website so other scholars can use it.  I’m meeting with Vince Kellen in IT to find out how social science faculty can work with IT to get help with data management.  I’ll keep you posted. 

Ideas for Statistical Workshops

1-2 days during the academic year, or up to 4 days during the summer. Add more ideas or comment on the suggestions below by sending me an email or leaving a comment.

• Handling Missing Data: Multiple Imputation
• R programming in social science research, see example
• Beyond Regression Tables: How to Effectively Present Quantitative Research A Workshop at Kansas University’s IPSR.
• Item Response Theory
• Web Survey Implementation & Introduction to Red Cap, UK’s Web Survey Software
• Multilevel Analysis
• Structural Equation Modeling
• Matching
• Spatial Analysis: Chris Bollinger and Jihai Yu (Economics) gave a 4-day Stata Workshop last summer (files are linked on Chris’s website). Is there interest in bringing someone in to give a presentation using a different software platform more specifically geared to spatial analysis, like ArcGIS or other Environmental Systems Research Institute products?
• Bayesian Statistics: An Introduction for Social Scientists
• Longitudinal Data Analysis Workshop, see example
• Dyad analysis: used in Psychology and International Relations

Ideas for Grant Workshops

Add more ideas or comment on the suggestions below by sending me an email or leaving a comment.

• Proposal development: Please come prepared with an idea you would like to develop (Project Development Office)
• Finding the right funding agency (PDO rep, A&S officer, state govt. agency, individual faculty from different social science units and fields)
• Invite NSF officers in social science divisions to UK (e.g., Sociology, Political Science, Law & Society)
• Invite representatives from the social science divisions of private foundations to UK (e.g., Pew Foundation, Ford Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson)
• NSF graduate student dissertation enhancement grants