Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series—Are you a principal investigator of a research project who wants to make your analyses more efficient? Are you concerned about making your results replicable? Are you a graduate student struggling to finish your dissertation? Do you want to streamline the process of organizing, analyzing, replicating, and communicating your research? If so, you can’t afford to miss this talk. 

This lecture is about the workflow of data analysis, which encompasses the entire process of scientific research: planning, documenting, and organizing your work; creating, labeling, naming, and verifying variables; performing and presenting statistical analyses; preserving your work; and (perhaps, most importantly) producing replicable results. Most of our work in statistics classes focuses on estimating and interpreting models. In “real world” research projects, these activities often involve less than 10% of the total work. This talk is about the other 90% of the work.  An efficient workflow saves time, introduces greater reliability into the steps of the analysis, and generates replicable results. Learning these skills will make you a more organized and successful researcher.

Dr. Long received the Paul Lazarsfeld Memorial Award for Distinguished Contributions to Sociological Methodology. He has authored eight books on statistics including The Workflow of Data Analysis Using STATA (2009), contributed many articles to the American Sociological Review and other journals, and teaches summer methods workshops at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. 

Scott Long, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor of Sociology and Statistics at Indiana University, Bloomington. In this Seminar, he will discuss his recent book, The Workflow of Data Analysis and his studies of health and aging, stigma and mental health, and human sexuality.

Click here to download a .pdf version of his presentation.

This lecture is sponsored by the Center for Research on Families’ Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series. The Center for Research on Families (CRF) is an endowed interdisciplinary research center in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and College of Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series brings internationally recognized speakers with expertise in family research to campus each year. The lecture series began in 1999 through an endowment established in memory of Tay Gavin Erickson.