Essex Summer School - Episode II

Olga Gryaznova is telling about her trip to Essex (and Cambridge!)

We already posted a wonderful essay on Essex Summer School by Anna Shirokanova. However, the “landing party” of the LCSR in Essex included also some other students. Now Olga Gryaznova, associate researcher at the LCSR, shares their experiences of the program.

I’ve started to participate in summer schools only in the previous year. But it seems that now I'm familiar with it quite well. I've attended six schools for two years: two of them were held by the LCSR, two by the Laboratory of Social and Cultural Research (HSE), one by European network for social policy analysis (ESPANET) and the last one by the University of Essex. Each had its own peculiarities, but also they had one common feature: they suggested one to get involved into a process of intensive scientific communication, which contributes both to raise a level of your own studies, and enhance research activity, expands methodological horizons and sociological imagination of participants. Unlike traditional education programmes summer schools besides knowledge provide us with ways how to cope with concrete problems posed in professional life, help to look at the research question from a new perspective and "dissect" it by means of new analytical techniques. It is also important that summer schools attract professionals working in similar disciplines, building up not just groups of the course participants, but long-term social networks,where scholars share relevant information, publications, and other important things; it is getting a kind of scientific navigation.

Each summer school was very bright and remarkable, but now I want to share my impressions of my last one, namely, 45th Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis. In a way, this is one of the forefronts of data analysis. For young sociologists, using quantitative methods in their researches, attending the school is a milestone in a scientific biography.

Masha Kravtsova and me have chosen a course Multivariate Data Analysis conducted by Alejandro Quiroz Flores and his teaching assistant Liam McGrath. The main purpose of this course was a search of the best model specifications for the different types of data with regard to their specificity and limitations. The beginning of the course was devoted to the basic econometric principles: we repeated properties of the OLS estimates, the Frisch-Waugh and Gauss-Markov Theorems, t-statistics, F-criterion, etc. After it we had a look to the tests of heterogeneity and "structural breaks", of heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation. Separately, we focused on the maximum likelihood method, analysis of nonlinear models and discrete variables, logit, probit and ordered probit models. The stuff dealing with time series and panel data analysis, as well as approaches to solving heterogeneity problems by means of instrumental variables, simultaneous equations, seemingly unrelated regression, two-stage least squares, truncated, and censored Tobit regressions was new for me. In general, the course was quite intense. One can even say that it covered several courses, which were conducted at the same time in other classrooms. In addition to interesting presentations and syntax for Stata Alex and Liam gave us a large archive of articles based on methods which had been discussed. Besides students could get presentations and training materials for other courses, many of them I have already downloaded. So, we can say that the two weeks of intensive work during the summer school is only the beginning of a deep dive into the problems.

In the morning my colleagues and I went to the math classes. Despite the fact that these classes were optional, the classroom was always full. I think it was not just because of the subject importance, but in many respects, due to the personality of the lecturer. Chris Saker talked about derivatives, differentials and the matrix with such an enthusiasm and inspiration, so it was impossible to skip such a positive intellectual charge!

I need to say a few words about the life outside academia in Essex. For me and Maria was very important that the University of Essex has a kindergarten. On the one hand, it has an indirect relation to our study, but I was the very important condition that allowed us to take part in the summer school, because our children were under the care of English teachers. It was also interesting experience for us. We were surprised that in the kindergarten children eat ice-cream and curry, are allowed to throw paints and are taken to a forest for gathering beetles and worms.  What a beautiful life!!!

Anna Shirokanova has already written about a trip to Cambridge in her item on Essex School. It was perfect indeed. Probably, Castalia from "The Glass Bead Game" by Hermann Hesse could look like that. Colleges are strict and at the same time refined, parks are moderate and lush, hours at colleges are slightly artsy, there we could hear organ and chorus. It seems that you breathe in line with history when you walk the same streets, which went Byron, Newton, Bacon, Darwin, Bohr, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, Popper, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, and many, many others, whose work constitute a large part of world culture.

So summer schools are not just intellectually upgrading activity, but also encouraging, and inspiring! It is very important that the LCSR conducts own summer schools and promotes academic mobility of its researchers.

by Olga Gryaznova