Psychology & Brain Sciences 891DA - S-Advanced Data Analysis

A critical component in the training of graduate students in psychology is research methods and statistics. The psychology department of UMass has long offered courses in both these areas, and the course I'm proposing aims at providing a bridge course, which focuses on the relationship between the design of an empirical study (correlational, quasi-experimental, experimental, etc.), and the data analytical techniques that can be used to extract valuable information from the data so collected. Rather than teaching this process in piecemeal fashion, as is commonly done (and necessary) in statistics or research methods, this course will take a holistic approach, focusing on how to use all available techniques at hand in order to fully analyze any given data set from start to finish. In the course we start from students' research questions and their own datasets, and we discuss the appropriate course of action in terms of data preparation (e.g. checking for distributions and data transformation, identifying univariate and multivariate outliers, etc.) and the specific statistical techniques to be used afterwards to test hypotheses, to use different analyses in a consistent manner within a study and across multiple studies belong to the same future publication. We will use students' own data to conduct the analyses, so that students have the added benefit of having an in-depth analysis of their research data. Analyses will be done with the aid of SAS, which is a powerful and flexible statistical package. Therefore the first few seminars will be devoted to learn its jargon. I have taught this program before to graduate students at The New School for Social Research, and I can attest that students will learn basic skills in SAS very quickly, and be ready to move on to the answering substantive questions using sophisticated analytical techniques.

Open to Graduate students only.