MRES meeting (THURS noon-1pm DK 2064)

Meeting Information.

The following lists the MRES meeting summary and readings. We meet weekly on Thursdays from noon-1pm in David King Hall, room 2064. Please feel free to join us for any and all meetings. Below are the readings and topics we discussed in past meetings or what we intend to discuss in the upcoming meetings.

MRES listserv

Each week, I send out an announcement about the upcoming meeting. Occasionally, I send out general interest articles. If you intend to come to our meetings, then please sign up for the listserv. It is an extremely low-volume list used exclusively for our group information dissemination. Here are the instructions to sign up:

  1. Compose an email message to: listserv@listserv.gmu.edu
  2. The email should have no subject and the message body should contain the following line and only this line: SUB MRES-L firstname lastname
  3. Replace the firstname and lastname above with your first and last names, respectively.
  4. Send the email message and wait for the confirmation. Once you reply to the confirmation message, you are signed up.

MRES Archives

Want to know what we have read and discussed over the past few years, please read the archives.

This week’s meeting and readings

  • November 19th, 2009: Today I would like to take a brief diversion to discuss the latest Chance News. There are at least 4 very interesting articles that ought to interest us all. Please read through it and come prepared to discuss the various topics. Also, if time permits, we ought to discuss Chapter 6 of the Exceptional Presenter.

Upcoming meetings

  • November 26th, 2009: No meeting - Thanksgiving

  • December 3rd, 2009: TBA

  • December 10th, 2009: TBA

  • December 17th, 2009: End of Year Celebration at the Auld Shebeen. Please RSVP to me as soon as you can so I can make reservations. We shall meet at the pub at roughly 5pm to kick off the holiday season. All significant others (p < .05) are welcome.

Previous meetings, topics and readings (sorted in reverse chronological order)

  • November 12th, 2009: No meeting - AEA conference

  • November 5th, 2009: Practice presentations with live feedback. Today we will put our discussions of the Exceptional Presenter to the test. Some of us will practice our presentations and the rest of us ought to come prepared to offer focused and constructive feedback.

  • October 29th, 2009: No meeting - I am out of town.

  • October 22nd, 2009: We will discuss evidence based applications in social science. I want to start with a more specific article published recently in the APS journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. That article sparked a fair bit of controversy in and around the clinical psychology community. If time permits, we can continue our discussion of the Exceptional Presenter (chapter 5).

  • October 15th, 2009: Today we will focus on Chapter 4 of the Exceptional Presenter. The last 20 minutes I would like to introduce the idea of shortening existing measures and improving predictive validity. There are no readings for the measurement topic but if there is sufficient interest I will post a great article on the wiki.

  • October 8th, 2009: We continue our discussion of “good research questions” today and also our ongoing discussion of the Exceptional Presenter (chapter 3 today). Those two topics ought to take the full 30 minutes, however, for those interested in Benford’s law, I suggest you read Carl Bialik’s latest Wall Street Journal piece on political polls.

  • October 1st, 2009: What makes a good research question good? This week I want to dissect the elements of a good research question so that we can all improve our ability to pose researchable questions that are feasible and productive. There are no readings this week’s primary topic but I want each of you to think of the qualities of a good research question and come prepared to talk about one question you think is really good. In addition to discussing questions, I would like to continue our discussion of presentations. Please come prepared to discuss Chapter 2 from the Exceptional Presenter.

  • September 24th, 2009: Jeff requested to discuss an article about philosophy of science and also to have some directed readings on the counter-factual. I located one article - by Michael Rutter in the 2007 (vol 4) of Perspectives in Psychological Science - that we read and discussed in MRES in 2007. I think it would be an excellent paper to discuss again. Be aware that the paper is rather long so I suggest you start reading it right away.

  • September 17th, 2009: I would like to start discussing the Koegel book this week and, in particular, chapter 1. Please read the chapter before Thursday and come prepared to discuss effective or rather exceptional presentations. Also, we had some interest in Benford’s law. Carl Bialik - from the WSJ - wrote an excellent article on the law and how it may be applied to various numerical problems. He followed up that article with another article that ought to raise our skepticism of Benford’s law applicability to all numerical problems.

  • September 10th, 2009: (Placebo Effects) We will discuss this article on placebos. Regardless of your interest in drug trials, I think you will find this a thought-provoking article about unintended consequences with counter-factual designs.

  • September 3rd, 2009: Our first meeting of the semester. We discussed possible topics and those of you willing to express your interests during the meeting came up with the following list (with dates to be covered):
    • Placebo effects (my choice)
    • Benford’s law and the Iranian election results (Sept. 17th)
    • Research design and the counter-factual (Sept. 24th)
    • Asking good researchable questions (Oct. 1st)
    • Chamberlin, Platt, Mulaik, or other philosophy of science material
    • Person-centric versus variable-centric research
    • Variance in manipulations
    • Unit/level of analysis
    • Unobtrusive/non-reactive measures
    • HLM/MLM - perhaps a brief overview and demonstration?
    • Measurement as treatment
    • Paul Barrett’s ideas about measurement and statistics
    • Predictive versus descriptive models - Gigerenzer’s latest work on fast and frugal predictions

If you have any other ideas, please let me know and I will add them to the list.