Details about professional development courses offered at the 2026 ASA Annual Meeting are listed below. All attendees must register for the Annual Meeting to participate in these sessions.
In addition to these courses, we also offer several preconference sessions. View available preconferences.
Causal Mediation Analysis
When: Friday, August 7 at 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
Registration Fee: $40
Session Organizer: Geoffrey Thomas Wodtke, University of Chicago
About this Course: Causal mediation analysis lies at the very heart of scientific inquiry. It seeks to uncover not just whether but also why an exposure, treatment, or stimulus affects an outcome by quantifying the processes and mechanisms through which a causal effect operates. That is, it aims to identify causal chains that connect an exposure to an outcome via intermediate variables known as mediators. This class will cover methods for analyzing causal mediation with an emphasis on social science applications. It will use precise notation and accessible conceptual diagrams to lead students from basic definitions of effects, via minimally necessary assumptions, to cutting-edge estimation procedures. It will provide a comprehensive guide for analyzing causal mediation using modern techniques, including effect decomposition, adjustment for confounding, analysis of multiple mediators, and estimation via regression modeling, inverse probability weighting, and machine learning methods. The class will address both theory and conceptual material alongside practical implementation. The course will draw on the instructor’s new book from Cambridge University Press, Causal Mediation Analysis, and its associated R and Stata packages.
Getting the Literature Review Right
When: Friday, August 7 at 1:00-5:00 p.m.
Registration Fee: $30
Session Organizer: Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana, University at Albany, SUNY
About this Course: The format of a journal article’s literature review is a major source of confusion for graduate students and early career scholars. Why? Because writing course papers, comprehensive exams, and even a dissertation doesn’t prepare anyone for how to write a literature review for a peer reviewed journal article. Instead of being a culmination of all of the reading you’ve done or a “review of the literature,” a literature review for a journal article should be an argument about the prior literature that justifies your study. In this professional development course, all participants will draft a literature review through a series of hands-on activities and group feedback exercises that will take their literature review from TMI (too much information) to a clear argument that sets up the contribution of their study.
Learning Objectives:
After participating in the course, participants will:
- Be able to articulate what a good literature review should and should not do,
- Be able to identify room for improvement in their draft literature reviews,
- Have a draft of their journal article’s literature review, and
- Have a plan for any further revisions their literature review needs.
To prepare for the workshop, all participants must submit a draft of their findings section to the workshop leader one week before the session.
State-of-the-Art Methods for Measuring the Degree of Assortative Mating
When: Friday, August 7 at 8:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Registration Fee: $5
Session Organizer: Anna Naszodi
About this Course: The objective of this half-day course is to help participants develop a comprehensive understanding of how to measure the degree of marital sorting when the goal is to identify patterns of inequality between social groups. We begin by defining marital sorting as a process that shapes observed marriage patterns, emphasizing its distinction from the structural constraints of the population that determine which pairings are feasible.
We then motivate why analyzing couple formation is a powerful approach to studying inequality. Next, we introduce a broad set of tools from the assortative mating literature, including statistical sorting indicators (e.g. odds-ratio, correlation and regression coefficients, Coleman–Liu–Lu indicator), as well as indirect measures based on counterfactual decompositions (including the iterative proportional fitting algorithm, the NM-method, and the GNM-method).
We use both constructed numerical and empirical examples in order to illustrate how qualitative findings can be highly sensitive to methodological choices. This naturally leads to the intellectually most exciting part of the course: addressing the philosophical-methodological question of which tools are suitable for measuring the degree of sorting. To guide this selection, we present analytical and empirical criteria that can be used to decide whether a tool is fit for purpose.
Participants will gain practical knowledge that prepares them to develop their own research on assortative mating. They will also be invited to submit their work to a special issue edited by the presenters.