Finalizing Statistical Workshops, 2010-11

Based on your input and many discussions, I’ve narrowed down the list of potential topics for statistical workshops to those that would inspire the greatest interest and attendance. 3 of the first 4 listed below would be my preference. I also met with the Director of Michigan’s ICPSR summer methods program who recommended several good presenters.  I’d also like your advice on scheduling the workshops.  My own feeling is that the best opportunity for scheduling presenters and maximizing attendance would be to schedule most workshops during the early summer, well before the ICPSR in July.  The last two summers, the Martin School and Economics scheduled workshops the week of June 1 in Event Count Models (J.S. Butler), Spatial Econometrics (Chris Bollinger & Jihai Yu) and Frontier Functions (J.S. Butler).  I propose we shoot for that week again this summer, though I’m open to other recommendations.  As before, please add more ideas or comment on the suggestions below by sending me an email or leaving a comment.

• Intro to R programming and Statistical Graphs (Bill Jacoby, Political Science, MSU). Morning and afternoon sessions, 1 day. The idea would not be to get people to convert to R, but to learn the basics to be able to run the huge store of statistical programs from an R shell. Most beneficial would be graphing and multiple imputation programs, which are vastly superior to those available in, say, STATA. In my field there is emerging a huge emphasis on presenting statistical (e.g., regression) results in graphs instead of tables, but Stata and Excel are often not up to the task.
• Handling Missing Data: Multiple Imputation. (Tenko Raykov, College of Education, MSU). I think this workshop would have widespread appeal across departments and could be handled in one session. My preference would be to have the presenter show people how to use Gary King’s Amelia software, which is applicable to time-series and comparative settings. Then the presenter would show people how to combine the multiply imputed datasets in doing analysis in STATA (and SPSS?).
• Multilevel Analysis, a popular request. (Tenko Raykov, College of Education, MSU). Also, some people would like to have an extension to longitudinal, panel and growth curve models.  Question:  what software should the presenter use? HLM is popular but clunky, at best. Stata has its relative advantages over HLM in post-estimation analysis and graphing, but can be much slower than HLM for larger datasets.
• Spatial Econometrics. Paul Voss, Odum Institute (emeritus in rural sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, expert in spatial analysis and spatial regression). At ICPSR, he does a week-long course, "Introduction to Spatial Regression Analysis," that he co-teaches with Katherine Curtis, that uses free software--GeoDa and R. This would build on the workshop presented by Chris Bollinger and Jihai Yu (Economics) using Stata last summer. This is likely to be more time-intensive and expensive, and we would need support from other units across campus. (Note: there is a 3-day workshop on using ArcGIS software for which there is a $700 registration fee. Our interest, however, is in spatial econometric analysis. Consult the Geospatial Science and Technology (GST) working group website for more info on ArcGIS software, which can be downloaded for free at UKIT.)
   
• Matching. This is increasingly popular in political science, but I didn’t hear a lot of requests for it outside my own department.
• Structural Equation Modeling. Requested by a few. Primarily used in Sociology and Psychology these days.  One of the consultants (Adam) in the SSTARS Center/Applied Statistics Lab is very helpful with SEM.  I think the best software is AMOS in SPSS, for which UK has a university site license, either via the discount at SSTARS Center or for free for A&S faculty and grad students.
• Computer Content Analysis. Increasingly essential in social science as a method of coding digitized text for analysis.  NSF sponsored a summer workshop and a useful website of vimeo and paper postings at the University of Washington.  This might be a good topic for next summer.