Sponsored through the generosity of Eric Mindich, this annual conference explores the latest empirical research in the social sciences that has potential application to practical social problems. Recent conferences have explored such topics as bargaining strategies, behavioral finance, implicit prejudice, the nature of religious belief, small interventions with large effects, and the social psychology of everyday unethical behavior.
All IQSS affiliates are invited to submit proposals for topics (and visitors) that meet the Experimental Social Science theme. For details, see Funding, Faculty Conferences.
New Directions in Text Analysis (2008-2009)
May 29-30, 2009
This conference brings together a group of approximately 45 scholars in the social sciences, biomedical sciences, humanities, and law (substantive researchers), along with methodological innovators in computer science, computational linguistics, and statistics (technical researchers). Specifically, the conference aims to a) provide substantive researchers with a better idea of cutting edge methods for natural language processing; b) provide technical researchers a better sense of the fundamental questions that drive much empirical work in the humanities, social sciences, law, and biomedical sciences; and c) identify points of intersection between important substantive problems and open methodological problems.
April 17, 2009
It is widely recognized that survey research faces methodological challenges which have created general skepticism about survey research as a method among many practitioners and consumers. At the same time, new technologies have dramatically lowered costs for some types of survey methods (especially opt-in web surveys), resulting in a proliferation of new data. Unfortunately, a lack of methodological transparency and gaps between the way that survey methodologists understand survey quality and the way survey data are often reported limit the use of many of these new surveys both for the study of survey methodology and substantive inquiry. This conference is designed to bring together experts in survey methodology and important practitioners from the media, government, and major academic surveys to discuss our current understanding of survey quality, the challenges presented in designing and using survey data in light of rapidly emerging technologies, and the opportunities that increasing variation in survey methods may provide for better understanding the nature of survey data and social phenomena.
Conference on Computational Social Science (2007-2008)
Sponsored by IQSS, the Program on Networked Governance, the Legatum Center, and the Living the Future Project.
The development of enormous computational power and the capacity to collect enormous amounts of data has proven transformational in a number of scientific fields. The emergence of a computational social science has been slower than in the sciences. However, the combination of the still exponentially increasing computational power with a massive increase in the capturing of data about human behavior makes the emergence of a field of computational social science desirable, but not inevitable.