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Interview with Eduard Ponarin

The 3rd LCSR Summer school has recently finished in Zelenogorsk. Eduard Ponarin, the Director of the Laboratory, shares his impressions about the school and tells about further plans of the LCSR.

Last week the 3rd Summer school of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research “Multilevel Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MCFA) and Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling (MSEM) came to the end. This year more than 40 young researchers from universities and research centers of Russia, the CIS and Europe came to Zelenogorsk in order to take part in the school. The program of the school included both courses on advanced statistical methods, and guest lectures delivered by famous sociologists from different countries.

Eduard Ponarin, the director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, shared his impressions about the past event and told us about the further plans concerning the next LCSR summer school.

- Eduard, what is your opinion about the school in general, what are your impressions?

I think, generally it was a success. The course of Hermann Dülmer was very interesting and useful. Two years ago when he first delivered a course on multilevel regression modeling at the first LCSR Summer School “ Multilevel Analysis in Comparative Studies ” participants were simply not prepared to work on a high methodological level and they had hard time understanding the technique. I am proud to say that in the two years since that time, the Laboratory’s staff has progressed a great deal and this year people easily learned such a complex technique as multilevel structural equation modeling, which is harder than simple multilevel regression modeling.

At the same time, there were also some disappointments. In particular I regret to say that some of the progress reports presented by our staff this time were rather weak, although the general level was rather good. We will have to make some adjustments, but I should say that it is a natural process. When organization has functioned for some time it has to self regulate itself— otherwise, things will stop developing and there will be no progress anymore. Having said this, I want to emphasize once again that my overall impression is very positive and our experience at the last school shows that the LCSR network pools very talented scholars from all over the world who are always ready to share their experience and help each other.

- And what about reports of new participants?

Well, some of the participants who presented their reports were not really interested in becoming a part of our network; they simply participated in the summer school, so those reports were not particularly strong. On the other hand, some people who applied for the membership in the LCSR network were more motivated, their presentations were stronger. The quality of new projects varied but still it was a pleasure to meet new people and discuss their projects. I hope the feedback our researchers gave to these participants will be useful for their projects.

- The School’s program included guest lectures delivered by prominent foreign scholars. Could you please tell us a few words about these lectures?

Francesco Sarracino delivered three lectures on different topics that constituted almost a mini course. I found his report on happiness very interesting; he is really an expert on this issue. He has just produced a book on this topic, which is dedicated to LCSR, because Francesco mentioned his affiliation with the Lab in the book. Then he delivered a more technical lecture on using LaTeX with Stata and the last one was a very important lecture on working with missing data. I think it was very useful. Also we had quite an informative lecture by Malina Voicu on gender attitudes in Europe. This piece of research is not published yet but I believe it will be a very strong publication. Bogdan Voicu also made a good presentation on integration of high skilled migrants. Typically, migrant research concentrates on low skilled migrants while high-skilled are rarely studied. This research touches upon the issue which is a core area of the Lab’s research interests, that’s why Bogdan’s presentation was particularly interesting for all of us.

-Please, try to remember expectations you had before the beginning of the School. How do you think it was better or worse than you had expected? Were there any surprises for you?

As I have mentioned before, I had kind of an unpleasant surprise when some of the reports presented by the LCSR researchers turned out to be not very strong. But other than that, I think that the Summer School was about the level of my expectations, in other words it was a very good school.

- Last school completed a 3-year cycle of LCSR schools dedicated to multilevel analysis and structural equation modeling. Which method of analysis will be chosen for the school next year?

We are still thinking about this. We had a preliminary agreement with Robert Anderson who is a professor at McGill University and specializes on methods.  He was supposed to teach a course on data mining in R using visualization techniques. That would be a very interesting course. Unfortunately, it turned out that he would not be able to visit us. And we are still considering various options at this point. Because the final decision has not been made I would rather not list the options we are considering.

-Thank you for the interview.

by Ekaterina Turanova