8th ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques
Marharyta Fabrykant talks about her visit in Slovenia
Marharyta Fabrykant (an associated researcher at LCSR) has recently participated at the 8th ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques which took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, from July 25 to August 10, 2013. She tells about the courses she attended during the school.
The ECPR summer school in Ljubljana is one of the world’s largest methodological schools for social and political scientists. This year its program included 5 three-day-long refreshing courses, 8 main two-week courses, and 14 one-week courses. Thanks to the financial support from the LCSR, I attended two one-week-long courses – Multilevel regression analysis for continuous variables and Advanced multilevel regression modeling. During the courses I learned to estimate multilevel logistic regression models, which are especially important in improving the project on predictors of national pride that I am currently working on. Also, I will be able to use multilevel models for longitudinal data and nonlinear multilevel regressions in my research. Besides, the last lecture included an introduction to Bayesian statistics, which is one of the topics that are at the forefront of quantitative methods in the contemporary social sciences, and which I would like to study more thoroughly.
Organization of the school allowed not to get distracted by trivia and to focus fully on attending classes and doing homework. During the 35-degree heat wave, which covered Ljubljana throughout the two weeks of the school, it was especially pleasant to stay in cool air-conditioned audiences and master new theories and try out new program codes. All practical assignments were conducted on real, not artificially simplified data, and in R software exclusively. As a person prone to trust words and formulas, rather than images, I was particularly impressed by the opportunities of an R package called "ggplot2". For instance, when using this package, only several lines of code suffice to produce dozens of highly readable mini-graphs – one for each country presented in the database. The experience gained during the summer school definitely persuaded me of the nessesity of switching to R. This software offers huge opportunities, but because of the many syntax details requires much time to master. Therefore I would like to wish my colleagues and myself to work all the year round as intensively and thoughtfully as during summer schools.
by Marharyta Fabrykant