LCSR Summer School Day 1
Our Summer School has begun yesterday by nice teambuilding evening and now "LCSR News Agency" starts to publish daily reportages from the Helios Hotel in the town of Zelenogorsk near Saint Petersburg where School is being held on the Website of the Lab. Reviews of participants' reports and guest lectures and all the information about other interesting events both formal and informal will be posted up here during the next two week.
The first day of the 2nd International LCSR Summer School started with welcoming words by Eduard Ponarin, the Director of the Lab, and Tatiana Karabchuk, the Deputy Director of the Lab. LCSR Management greeted all the participants of the Summer School and wished productive and useful work during the study course by Prof. Schmidt.
At 9.30 am the first theoretical session by Peter Schmidt began. Prof. Schmidt started with basic theoretical explanation of principle of Confirmatory Factor Analysis method. Moreover he pointed out types of models that can be constructed with CFA. Main advantages of MPlus software for construction of such models were also mentioned.
After coffee-break Zsofia Ignaz (Humboldt University in Berlin), the assistant teacher for the main course, started practical session with introducing MPlus interface. Later participants practiced in generating MPlus language for the first time and created their first models in this software which is new computer program for the most participants. After that Zsofia and Prof. Schmidt explained how MPlus output should be interpreted.
During after-lunch session associate researchers of LCSR presented their progress reports. Olga Gryaznova and Elena Prutskova presented the final versions of their research projects, which were highly evaluated by the discussants. Anna Almakaeva presented new multilevel models concerning her topic of out-group trust. Anna Nemirovskaya also demonstrated new results that she received during last two months.
The last session of the day was given for the personal consultations by Prof. Hermann Duelmer (University of Cologne) who was the lecturer on multilevel modeling in HLM during the last year LCSR Summer School.
by Olga Basmanova