Didactic Seminars

Session Organizer: Janet Mancini Billson, Group Dimensions International
Leader: Janet Mancini Billson, Group Dimensions International

Description: This interactive, practical workshop helps participants to identify the uses of focus groups in program evaluation and basic research. The goal is to foster successful focus group research in a wide variety of cultural settings, with an eye to producing reliable scientific data, rather than "interesting information." The workshop includes two demonstration focus groups with volunteer participants, as well as an overview of research design, the moderator's guide, and recruitment and screening. The emphasis is on linking group dynamics and methodological theory to qualitative research endeavors.

Session Organizer and Leader: Leora Lawton, TechSociety Research

Description: Creating segmentations is statistical technique to group respondents together by similarity of attitudes and/or characteristics. These segmentations – sometimes known as typologies – have long been used in marketing but are also very useful in understanding how different people relate or behave with respect to social services, political behavior, or any kind of relationship. This workshop will first discuss the logic and structure behind segmentations. Then, we’ll go through examples of creating segmentations, first by using a combination of factor analysis and cluster analysis, and then a technique known as a Classification Tree. (CHAID or CRT). We’ll end with a discussion on how to interpret and apply the results. Attendees are expected to have a working knowledge of SPSS and multivariate analysis. It will be useful to attend with laptops with SPSS (and a full 1-month demo copy can be downloaded for free from www.spss.com) but powerpoints and handouts will detail the entire process. Handouts will be provided, including SPSS syntax.

Session Organizer: Lynn Smith-Lovin, Duke University
Leaders: Lynn Smith-Lovin, Duke University; and Dawn T. Robinson, University of Georgia

Description: Affect Control Theory is a mathematical theory that links cultural meanings and the control processes underlying social behavior. It assumes that people learn meanings about identities and actions from their culture, and then attempt to maintain those symbolic meanings in social interaction. It differs from other theories in that it measures meaning in a three-dimensional metric, estimates changes in meaning from interaction empirically, and represents the control process of meaning maintenance with a mathematical model. The seminar will cover the intellectual history, current structure and substantive applications of the theory, concentrating on teaching interested participants the more formal (mathematical) structure of the theory. A large part of the seminar will focus on how to use the simulation program, INTERACT, that represents the formal theoretical model. Since INTERACT is useful in both teaching (undergraduate and graduate) as well as research applications, the objectives of the seminar will include both an introduction to the formal structure of the theory for potential researchers and the development of tools for those interested in teaching the theory.

Session Organizer: Kathryn Edin, Harvard University
Leaders: Kathryn Edin, Harvard University; and Susan Clampet-Lundquist, Saint Joseph's University

Session Organizer and Leader: Sharlene Hesse-Biber, Boston College

Description: Emergent technologies have pushed against the boundaries of qualitative research practice. This didactic workshop will explore issues regarding how qualitative researchers can effectively apply new technological innovations, including the use of the internet, mobile phone technologies, geospatial technologies, and the incorporation of computer-assisted software programs, to collect and analyze both qualitative and mixed-methods data. This workshop will: (l) Provide an overview of some of the newest mobile technologies (using GPS) in the service of gathering qualitative data. The mobile phone allows the researcher to capture personal experience in real time and space The collection of user experience data has enormous implications for the study of human interaction. The researcher is able to study experience in context over an extended period of time using fewer resources and in a less obtrusive manner. We provide in-depth examples how this technology might be applied to a qualitative research project. We will also discuss some of the ethical, issues emergent technologies raise for social researchers. (2) Computer Assisted Software for Multi-media Analysis. We demonstrate the latest data gathering and analysis software for analyzing multi-mediated data qualitative data —web-based data, audio, video and images using the computer-assisted data analysis package, HyperResearch (www.researchware.com) (3). Transcription Software for Qualitative Data Analysis We will also demonstrate cutting edge transcription software and discuss how the importance of transcription and its role in analyzing your qualitative data. We will demonstrate the transcription software, HyperTranscribe (www.researchware.com).

Session Organizer and Leader: Yuki Kato, Towson University

Description: This seminar is designed to introduce participants to the software and answer some common questions beginning users confront. It is recommended for those who have never used Atlas.ti before or have only limited experience with the software. Researchers who have some familiarity of Atlas.ti are also welcome to attend to refresh, to participate in the open-discussion and/or to share tips and advice. Participants are not required to bring Atlas.ti software with them or to have ever worked with the software.

Session Organizer and Leader: Elaine Kaplan, University of Southern California

Description: This seminar will explore the promises, possibilities and pitfalls of using photography while conducting sociological research. The photo essay medium can provide a unique opportunity for the participants to document and to express their experiences through personally meaningful imagery. We will examine how photograph allow us to explore the complexity of the interior and exterior lives of those whose experiences often remains silent and hidden from the world. We will discuss and demonstrate how photography can add to our understanding of our study participants’ lived experiences. We will also examine how photographs can facilitate the interview process. This session will also consider how photography introduces new possibilities for activism and social change, on part of both researchers and informants. The organizers will focus in particular on using photography with adolescent subjects and provide visual examples from their research. Workshop participants are also encouraged to share their experiences using photography and other visual aides in research. We will also discuss the potential of this method as a teaching tool in helping college students create visual paper projects.

Session Organizer and Leader: Thomas Scheff, University of California, Santa Barbara

Description: This seminar will focus on defining single-meaning concepts of alienation and solidarity, and, as it happens, points between. By reviewing various ideas and theories about the two terms, we will relate them to each other, and to other important ideas, such as consensus, social facts, and intergroup cooperation/ hostility. The workshop will show how the two concepts lead to provisional operational definitions, and preliminary methods for using them in process studies and survey research.

Session Organizer and Leader: A. L. Sinikka Dixon, Canadian University College

Description: The didactic seminar focuses on two separate research topics as illustrations of the usefulness of NVivo7. (I will be using NVivo7 QSR International Pty Ltd 1999-2007) The first is a study of marital satisfaction. I would like to illustrate how NVivo7 can be used to enrich secondary analysis of quantitative data by open coding open ended questions embedded in the survey initially analyzed by SPSS. In the second study I am interested in life histories based on semi-structured interviews of husbands and wives, focusing on their involvement in what I have theoretically called life cycles: age-life cycle, family-life cycle, education-life cycle, work-life cycle, and leisure-life cycle. Over the life course, we engage in and disengage from these various life cycles, which then become the backbone of our life histories, as well as the fabric of our involvements with those to whom we are emotionally and functionally linked. Prior to the didactic seminar, the participants will receive a pre-test which I hope they will e-mail to me to get a feeling of their level of expertise in qualitative research.

Session Organizer and Leader: Robert Parker, University of California-Riverside

Description: GIS (Geographic Information Systems) is a powerful set of database and computer mapping techniques that can transform Sociological research, teaching, and our discipline's ability to effectively communicate with outside audiences.  This course, to be held on Sunday, August 3 from 10:30 am to 12:10 will give a basic introduction to the art and science of GIS using ESRI's ArcGIS system of software.  Topics to be addressed include basic oin map construction, geocoding of address based data, merging of traditional data with map databases and geospatial information, sources of geospatial data, univariate and multivariate thematic mapping, 3D mapping, and techniques for imbedding maps in documents and presentations.  Material for the course will be drawn from GIS and Spatial Analysis in the Social Sciences, by Robert Nash Parker and Emily K. Asencio, from Routledge (2008); attendees will have the opportunity to purchase this new book at a convention discount at the conclusion of the course.