Drugs, Lost Villages and Bank Failure: Multidimensional Scaling to the Rescue
Venue: Room G.03 Informatics Forum, University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh
A lecture by Professor Tony Coxon, Emeritus Professor of Sociological Research Methods at the University of Wales and Professorial Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.
The event will be followed by a three-day training event on Multidimensional Scaling, led by Tony Coxon. Further details
Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) covers a whole family of models, deals with a variety of levels of measurement and can be adapted to a wide range of data-types. But it is often misrepresented as "a sort of Factor analysis" or merely as a visualization technique to portray complex data. In this talk, the intention is to show, by contrast, that MDS is a robust, informative and significant means of inferring structure relating to important substantive problems in a range of disciplines, and using a variety of data-types:
Illustrating the application of MDS to historical and archaeological research, showing how even in the face of considerably deficient data, MDS can be used to recover the location of "lost" villages and sites.
Tackling the timely topic of Bank Failure, showing that MDS can outperform logit and linear discriminant analysis in differentiating between (and predicting) individual bank failure and non-failure and also trace the time-path of failure.
Show how MDS can represent and analyse the consensus and differentiation in people's categorisation of drugs, using a variety of systematic and qualitative methods of data collection.
The talk aims to stir social researchers to be adventurous and innovative in their data collection and analysis, see how visualization can help presentation, and learn how MDS can help answer both methodological and substantive questions.
Biography
Tony Coxon has taught research methods at Leeds, MIT, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Essex Universities, and at Essex, Michigan and other inter/national Summer Schools. His main books include a trilogy on POOC, The User's Guide to Multidimensional Scaling and Key Texts in MDS, Sorting Data: Collection and Analysis and several on Human Sexualities, together with over 70 journal articles. He has served on a number of ESRC Committees and Panels, and been consultant/expert adviser on many international, public and professional bodies in health, research methods as well as Research training and Capacity-Building Projects in Scotland and Wales.
