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Research
While the research fostered by the Centre will be quantitative in nature, the substantive questions addressed will be diverse.
In very general terms, departments differ in the units of analysis they investigate. Psychologists tend to focus on individuals while sociologists tend to focus on groups or systems with political scientists and economists falling somewhere in the middle. The CCQSS would help bridge these cross-disciplinary boundaries by facilitating conversation and collaboration.
Current Research
The Centre for Computational Quantitive Social Science will carry out the following specific activities:
The Centre will host and provide logistical support for externally funded research as is warranted. This could include mathching grant seeking scholars with the appropriate collaborators to enhance the methodological rigor of their applications. In the future the Centre may offer a more formal statistical consulting service.
Faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars will be encouraged to disseminate original research in this series. We anticipate 2 to 3 papers per year initially.
CCQSS will provide space and time for faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and visiting scholars to present work in progress to members of the Centre and the faculty more broadly. Initially, the series will focus on internal speakers as we try to acquaint ourselves with what our colleagues in cognate fields are doing. Later, we will extend these opportunities to external speakers who can speak to the broad substantive constituency in the CCQSS. These could be particularly useful for grant applications that will ultimately be evaluated by interdisciplinary panels.
The Centre will host occasional methodological workshops that address current advanced and debates in quantitative methodology. These workshops will be roughly half-day events that will focus on both theory and applications. These could be conducted by graduate students, faculty, post-docs or visiting scholars as dictated by demand, expertise and availability.
The Centre will build and curate a directory of methodological expertise that exists within the Faculty. This will help identify areas of relative strength across the Faculty as well as giving scholars potential points of contact for methodological queries. This could also serve as a list of potential grant collaborators for cross-disciplinary projects.
The Centre will build and curate a list of courses across the Faculty that focus on methodological issues along with the syllabi for those courses. This will help students and faculty advisers choose courses that will help build skills necessary for research. We will also identify courses that are generally able and willing to accept additional students. The course directory will help identify areas of strength and weakness across the faculty that could help guide hiring. The CCQSS will also use this to identify areas of demand for specialized courses across the Faculty that could then be taught by FSS faculty members as they so choose.
The Centre will maintain a high-quality website, which will play a key role in disseminating and publicizing activities and research products. The Centre’s website will publicize and highlight cutting edge quantitative work done by Faculty Associates. Working Papers will be linked, but hosted separately on the Scholarship@Western site. The website will also feature current information about speakers, workshops and other Centre events. In consultation with Western’s Media Relations office, CCQSS will publicize research products and activities through a selective, targeted media release strategy.
CCQSS will host Post-Doctoral Researchers and Visiting Faculty who conduct work on quantitative methodology and its use in the social sciences.
CCQSS will sponsor a competition that will encourage graduate students to write methodologically cutting-edge papers. The annual award of $500 will be decided by a committee of affiliated Faculty who will review nominated work.
Research Themes
While the research fostered by the Centre will be quantitative in nature, the substantive questions addressed will be diverse. There are several methodological themes that will prove to have great cross-disciplinary appeal. For example:
- Experimentation, the modus operandi of psychology, is only now entering the mainstream of political science and sociology. No doubt, the expertise in experimental design could foster bonds between psychology and the other social sciences.
- The Geography department’s focus on GIS and spatial analytics could easily cross disciplinary boundaries into political science and sociology as existing results get contextualized with important spatial attributes.
- Political science and sociology have made great advances in the use of observational data in quantitative analysis, including the use of Bayesian modeling. There are currently no formal courses taught in any social science department dealing with Bayesian statistics. One of the goals of the Centre is to identify demand for specialized courses across departments.
- Researchers in economics have made great strides in identifying causal effects. These methods are interesting across the social sciences. Each department, with its unique set of skills and expertise will contribute to the growing quantitative trend in Canadian social science.
- Psychology has long been concerned with rigorous evaluation of test construction. This could be easily paired with the expertise in survey design in political science to produce incredibly fruitful discussions.
- From history to political science, many social science fields rely on archival research. We have expertise in history and political science in the acquisition and analysis of text data. Bringing these groups of scholars together could be beneficial to all.
Working Papers
Faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars will be encouraged to disseminate original research in this series. We anticipate 2 to 3 papers per year initially.