Workshops
August 3-7, 2015
Scott Long, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Statistics, Indiana University
This workshop teaches you how to plan, organize, document, and execute sophisticated quantitative analyses with any type of statistical methods. The goal is to help you create a workflow that is efficient and accurate while generating reproducible results.
June 15 – 16, 2015
Sarah Reber, Professor of Public Policy, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
This mini-course provides a practical introduction to data visualization (or, more prosaically, “making graphs”). Students will learn how to use data visualization to conduct research and to communicate findings accurately and effectively. Instruction is conveyed primarily through examples. Students will also learn how to implement (some of) these techniques in Stata and have opportunities to complete in-class and out-of-class exercises to practice the techniques.
June 30, 2011
Spiro Maroulis and Paulo Blikstein
When we observe economic and social systems, gather information, draw inferences, and attempt to predict future outcomes, we are engaged in a process of informal modeling. The workshop introduced IES students to the process of converting such informal models and intuitions into more tangible, formal computational models that users can run, explore, and use to try to change and refine theoretical ideas. The theoretical and methodological basis for this workshop comes from the emerging field of complex systems – a field that studies the dynamics of systems, such as organizations, whose behavior is the consequence of many different interdependent agents, and can be difficult to research using traditional analytical and empirical methods. To investigate the behavior of a natural or social system over time, complex systems research often makes use of computational agent-based models. In particular, agent-based models are used to discover the emergence of macro-level properties from the individual-level actions of the agents, as well as identify leverage points in a social systems – points where a small, local change can have a disproportionate system-level impact.