LCSR Summer School. Day 3

Pavel Kuzmichev's article

LCSR summer school on Multilevel Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MCFA) and Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling (MSEM) in MPLUS keeps going! Pavel Kuzmichev (a research assistant at LCSR) shares his experience.

At the third day of the LCSR summer school professor Duelmer started to explain multilevel confirmatory factor analysis in detail. He used the WVS data to replicate the study of Inglehart and Norris on work ethic. This example was clear and made it easy to understand the basics of two-level confirmatory factor analysis.

After the lunch Aleksey Domanov presented his progress report on “Commitment to Nationalism: Predictors of Popular Political Euroscepticism about Common Immigration Policy in the EU” project. He studies the factors that led to the rise of euroscepticism and reasons of decreasing support of common immigration policy in Europe. He also spoke about some methodological issues of his research since it is pretty hard to select a proper method for his tasks. While Chris Swader made a couple of points on theoretical aspect of this research, Edward Ponarin tried to find the ways for improvement the methodological side of the paper.

Marharyta Fabrykant presented a work that arouse a big discussion called “Why So Proud? Individual and Country-Level Predictors of National Pride”. She came to a striking conclusion in her research: individuals and countries with high national pride could be described as traditionalists; however, they seem to be well adapted, happy and satisfied with their life in the modernizing world.

After the end of the section Bogdan Voicu held a guest lecture called “High-Skilled Immigrants and Social Integration in Times of Crisis. A Cross-European Analysis”. Professor Voicu operated with two main concepts: high skilled immigrants and global crisis. He came to a conclusion that high-skilled immigrants in fact show increasing life satisfaction as compared to natives during the economic crisis, but their well-being is not as high as it used to be comparing to other migrants. The lecture and the presentation were very informative and caused a massive discussion afterwards.

At the end of the day Alex Kustov gave the next lecture on LaTeX. He showed how to create beautiful LaTeX tables in R that are very easy to make, and how to render scalable vector plots. Finally, he explained how to use a LaTeX template for producing a nice-looking CV which is a very useful thing for every scholar.

After the dinner some of the LCSR members enjoyed playing volleyball and had a lot of fun. Some other people played mafia meanwhile.