On behalf of Michael Greenacre, I forward the following
course announcement to the list.
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International conference on
LARGE SCALE DATA ANALYSIS
May 25-28, 1999
Zentralarchiv fr Empirische Sozialforschung
University of Cologne, Germany
Second Call for Papers
In May 1999, the Zentralarchiv fr Empirische Sozialforschung,
in collaboration with Michael Greenacre of the Pompeu Fabra
University in Barcelona, is organizing an international conference
on the analysis of large data sets. The objective of the conference
is to bring together social scientists and statisticians who will
have worked on the same sets of empirical data using different
methodologies and different philosophies of data analysis.
The methodological topics included in the conference will be:
* Data quality
* Measurement
* Sampling and weighting
* Equivalence of indicators
* Treatment of nonresponses and missing data
* Visualization of categorical data
* Data mining and knowledge discovery
* Models for categorical data
* Structural equation modelling
* Multi-level analysis
* Scaling techniques
Participants who will present papers at the conference include:
Erling Andersen (Copenhagen), Simona Balbi (Naples),
Jaak Billiet (Leuven), Harold Clarke (Texas), Tony Coxon (Essex),
Carles Cuadras (Barcelona), Paul de Boeck (Leuven),
Rob Eisinga (Nijmegen), Antoine de Falguerolles (Toulouse),
Edith de Leeuw (Amsterdam), Uwe Engel (Potsdam),
Michael Friendly (Toronto), Wolfgang Gaul (Karlsruhe),
John Gower (Open University), Jacques Hagenaars (Tilburg),
Joop Hox (Utrecht), Ludovic Lebart (Paris),
Allan McCutcheon (Nebraska), Jacqueline Meulman (Leiden),
Gtz Rohwer (Bochum), Tamas Rudas (Budapest),
Albert Satorra (Barcelona), Peter Schmidt (Mannheim),
Victor Thiessen (Halifax), Karl Erich Wolff (Darmstadt),
Andries van der Ark (Tilburg), Peter van der Heijden (Utrecht),
Jeroen Vermunt (Tilburg) and Wijbrandt van Schuur (Groningen).
The database on which the conference is centred is from the
International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), a voluntary
grouping of study teams in over 20 countries. Each country
undertakes to include common questions as a supplement to
their regular national surveys. The topics change from year
to year by agreement, and are replicated every five years or so.
Some examples of topics are: the role of government, social
inequality, family and changing gender roles, religion, and
environment.
The ISSP data to be considered in the conference are available
in the form of a compact disk (CD-ROM), which contains data sets
for each year from 1985 to 1995, for several countries at a time.
Data files are supplied both in ASCII and SPSS format. Codebooks,
variable lists, as well as the PDF files of scanned pages of all
the original questionnaires are also distributed on the CD-ROM.
This database gives a unique opportunity for making comparative
social research between different countries on the same topic,
as well as investigating trends over time when the study is
replicated.
Papers presented at the conference based on analysis and
substantive interpretation should satisfy the following two
minimum prerequisites: (1) the analysis should have a clearly
stated social science or methodological motivation, including
a justification for the particular selection of variables;
(2) some cross-national comparison must be included in the
analysis and the results.We particularly encourage methodologies
which permit the interpretation and understanding of large amounts
of data.
Prospective participants should contact the Zentralarchiv to
request a CD-ROM with the complete database available at present.
The cost of this CD-ROM is 50 DM, but this cost will be deducted
from the registration fee of those attending the conference. There
is a Web page giving details of the ISSP, including codebooks of
the surveys, variable lists and crosstabulations of each variable
across countries, at the following address:
http://www.za.uni-koeln.de/issp
Some notes on the contents of the CD-ROM are contained in a Word
document or PDF file available from the Web page:
http://www.econ.upf.es/databases
Abstracts should be submitted to the organizers by 31 January 1999,
and should be approximately two pages in length, containing the
following information: (1) title, (2) author(s), (3) affiliation(s),
(4) keywords and (5) a summary, including the aim of study, the
surveys/countries/variables used and the statistical methodology
employed.
The conference fee will be 150 DM (of which 50 DM will be refunded
to those having purchased the CD-ROM). Deadline for registration
for the conference (without presenting a paper) is 31 March 1999.
For further information and requests for data, please contact:
Jrg Blasius
Zentralarchiv fr Empirische Sozialforschung
Bachemer Str. 40
D-50931 Cologne
Germany
Fax: +49 221 4769444
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
or Michael Greenacre at e-mail: [log in to unmask]
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| Jan Graffelman | internet: [log in to unmask] |
| Universitat Pompeu Fabra | tel: 34-93-5421621 |
| Ramon Trias Fargas 25-27 | fax: 34-93-5421746 |
| 08005 Barcelona, Spain | |
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