REGISTER HERE
Pre-conference workshops will take place on Wednesday, June 20th, 2018 between 8:30 am and 5:00 pm. More details regarding workshop fees and registration are available at: https://subline.ualberta.ca/26#anchor_230. Seats are limited, so register soon!
Workshop 1
Robert V. Kail
Clear, Concise, and Graceful Scientific Writing
This workshop will consist of several lessons designed to help participants learn to write clearly, concisely, and gracefully. The workshop will be highly interactive: each lesson is organized around a single theme (e.g., how to convey emphasis) in which heuristics are presented and participants practice those heuristics in an anonymous chat room.
Workshop 2
Marina Doucerain
Webs of relationships: An Introduction to Social Network Theory, Research, and Analysis
Social network theory and research show that people are embedded in webs of relationships, and that the structure of these relations strongly influences individual actors within it, in domains ranging from language learning to national security or public health. The role of social networks in people’s lives is multifaceted. For example, in addition to the provision of social support, social networks are also essential for the transmission of information, cultural values, language practices, and people’s sense of belonging and social identities. To date, few studies have adopted a social network approach in psychology, but there is a growing interest in how such an approach can shed new light on human functioning.
This workshop provides an introduction to researchers interested in studying social networks, with a particular emphasis on egocentric networks (analyzing an individual’s personal network in contrast to a complete bounded network such as a class or a corporation). The first objective is to offer a primer on social network theory and terminology. The second objective is to provide an overview of the research methods involved in collecting social network data. The third objective is to help participants develop basic skills in social network data analysis in R. Lab exercises will allow participants to apply the information learned and practice the procedures presented during the workshop.
Workshop 3
Ryan L. Boyd
Foundations and Practice in Computerized Language Analysis Techniques
The analysis of language has long been a mainstay of mainstream psychology. Recently, fields as diverse as psychology, medicine, and the computational sciences, to name a few, have begun to adopt psychological language analysis to better understand human psychology in the real world. Furthermore, incredible advances have taken place in psychological analysis of language in the past 2 decades, particularly in the field of automated techniques for psychological measurement. As our field progresses into the worlds of big data and more rigorous methods, language analysis is perhaps more relevant now than ever before.
This workshop will provide a foundational, hands-on training in modern computerized text analysis techniques. Core concepts of automated language analysis will be covered, including data acquisition, preparation, and “rules of thumb” for applying these methods to your own work. Topics covered may be subject to change, but are planned to include data acquisition, cleaning, and organization; top-down analyses (“the dictionary approach”); bottom-up analyses (i.e., topic modeling/meaning extraction); visualizing results; and more advanced analyses, if time allows.This workshop will include several hands-on practice sessions with (mostly) free, open-source software. Most of the software is geared towards Windows computers, however, participants are still invited and able to participate / follow along even if they do not currently own a machine running Windows. Ultimately, the goal of this workshop is for you to be able to start using these techniques immediately, allowing you to get the most from your workshop experience.