Summer School Teaches How to Work with Latent Data
The fourth HSE LCSR summer school on Categorical Data Analysis is over. This year 40 young academics from universities and research centres in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Italy, Germany, Poland, Romania, Israel and the USA took part.
At the two-week summer school in Zelenogorsk near St Petersburg, they studied methods of working with categorical data (latent class analysis, loglinear regression and others). On the last day, the students presented the results of their mini-research, conducted during practicals on Professor Hagenaars’ course.
'Sociologists need to know how to work with categorical data', explained one of the school’s directors Tatiana Karabchuk. 'That is why we invited Jacques Hagenaars from the university of Tilburg and his PhD student Zhuzhu Bakk. Professor Hagenaars is one of the leading experts in the methodology of Categorical Data Analysis'.
The summer school programme also included elective courses given by the director of the LCSR, Michigan University professor Ronald Inglehart and the german political scientist, Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Social Sciences Research in Berlin, Hans-Dieter Klingemann.
Chia Liu, PhD Student at the Center for Demographic Studies in Barcelona (CED) talked about how the summer school helped her research:
'I am currently working on material deprivation of female headed households in Latin Amerca. We use IPUMS-I microdata, which requires categorization. I have benefited greatly from Professor Hagenaar's statistical expertise and wonderful suggestions from the staff and fellow students of LCSR'.
Olga Gasparyan, Junior Research Fellow at the HSE Laboratory of Political Research also found the school productive:
'This is the first time I’ve been to the LCSR summer school. At the moment I’m involved in a project on the relations between social expectations and political preferences in democratic and hybrid regimes. It was really useful to be able to present my research at the school and get feedback from my colleagues and teachers, and especially from such famous academics like Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Ronald Inglehart. It has given me an idea for a new approach to my research to study parties and their political programmes rather than states as a basis to determine political preferences'.
Ludmilla Mezentseva, HSE News Service
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