Pre-Conference Workshops

Pre-conference workshops will take place on Wednesday, June 20^th, 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

Purdue University

Robert V. Kail received his PhD from Michigan’s developmental program in 1975 and spent most of the ensuing 40 years at Purdue University, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of developmental change in speed of information processing during childhood and adolescence. Kail is editor of Child Development Perspectives and editor emeritus of Psychological Science. He received the McCandless Young Scientist Award from the American Psychological Association, is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan University. He is the author of Scientific Writing for Psychology: Lessons in Clarity and Style and Children and Their Development (7^th edition). These and his other books have been translated into six languages.

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

Université du Québec à Montréal

Marina M. Doucerain studies the social mechanisms – social relationships and networks in particular – underlying how people become functional members of a new cultural or social group. She focuses primarily on the changes that immigrants face when settling in a new society, with the firm belief that if we understand this change process more deeply, then we can better support the people going through it. Dr. Doucerain also specializes in quantitative research methods and analysis, with expertise in a variety of statistical techniques, ranging from social network analysis to structural equation modelling. She has a lot of experience in teaching data management, analysis and visualization using R. Marina M. Doucerain received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in social science (cultural psychology and applied linguistics) at Concordia University, (Montreal, QC, Canada) and then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Université du Québec à Montréal (Montreal, QC, Canada). She is presently an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology at Université du Québec à Montréal.

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

University of Texas at Austin

Ryan L. Boyd is a social psychologist / computational social scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. His research primarily focuses on how language can provide insights into a person’s personality, including their values, experiences, and motives. He has taught several workshops on language analysis, machine learning, and research methods. Ryan is currently a member of several research labs at the University of Texas at Austin and is a data scientist for the ShadowLAB project, as well as Receptiviti. His work has been featured in places such as CNN, the BBC, and NPR, and he is widely recognized as a leading expert in the area of automated psychological language analysis. Ryan is also the developer/designer of several software applications for text analysis, including the Meaning Extraction Helper, LIWC2015, and TAPA, to name a few. His favorite food is pizza, he loves coffee, and he has a dog that is objectively the best dog in the universe.

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.