Network News
Welcome to this month's Network News We are delighted that our membership numbers are continuing to rise steadily and we now have 1197 members from right across Scotland, and beyond. Around a third of our members are non-academic (from public, private and voluntary sectors) and around a quarter are students from Scottish Universities. Membership spans right across the social science disciplines, with the most highly represented being sociology, economics and psychology. We are always happy to share your news with the wider membership, so do get in touch if you have any relevant events or activities to publicise or news to report.
During the last three months AQMeN has been pleased to make available the Materials from some of its training courses held over the past two years. These can be accessed via the website, subject to completing a short application form. It is hoped that many members will find these useful for self-education and teaching purposes. During November AQMeN organised a one-day conference on Evaluating the Effectiveness of Public Services as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science. This proved extremely popular with both academic and non-academic members and the 90 available spaces were booked well ahead of the event. In December, a training course on the increasingly popular method of Geographically Weighted Regression was led by Stewart Fotheringham in the University of Dundee. Stewart also gave a fascinating lecture on his research to uncover the reasons behind the Irish potato famine using geographically weighted regression. Each of the events is reviewed in this edition of AQMeNtion by a network member.
Looking ahead AQMeN has several training courses and knowledge exchange events planned over the next few months. We are privileged that Stephen Raudenbush has agreed to give our Third Annual Lecture on 21 March. Stephen is the Lewis-Sebring Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University and his talk will focus on causal inference in the social world and the spillover effects of social interventions in criminology and education.
Following the popularity of our knowledge exchange event on Data Visualisation presented by Dr Steven Rogers from the ONS back in February 2011, we have organised a 1½ day workshop on Data Visualisation Principles and Techniques on 5-6th April 2012. The first day will be led by Steven, and the following half day will be led by Rikke Ivorsholte from the Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services, who participated in our Festival of Social Science conference on evaluating the effectiveness of public services back in November. Further details will shortly be available on the website.
In response to demand from members for training on Handling Missing Data, AQMeN are planning a three-day training course to be held during May. This will be led by Ian Plewis from the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research, and Jonathan Bartlett from the London School of Tropical Hygiene. Additionally, in advance of the course, there will be a one-day introductory course on Stata given by AQMeN partner Vernon Gayle from Stirling University, for those delegates who are new to the package.
In February AQMeN partner Andy Thompson will give his Inaugural Lecture entitled The State of the Citizenry: views from the communities on 20th February. All are welcome to attend.
The Local AQMeN Teams have also organised several events. In St Andrews there will be a training course on Structural Equation Modelling using Amos on 27th January. Members who wish to attend this course may be interested to read the article on alternative software packages for structural equation modelling covered in this issue. In Glasgow the AQMeN Social Statistics Group are holding a meeting on the theme of Multilevel Modelling followed by a wine reception on 24 January. In Stirling, there will be a workshop on Visualising Volunteering on 22 February run by Alasdair Rutherford, based on the project funded by the AQMeN collaborative small grants scheme.
Follow-up Consultation Meetings are being planned at several Scottish universities over the next few months. These will provide an opportunity for members to give their feedback on the network’s activities and the impact these have had, and to discuss future activities for their universities. Further details about these events will be available shortly.
Finally, on a non-statistical note, we are delighted to announce that Heather Thomson, AQMeN’s Training and Knowledge Exchange Officer, gave birth to a healthy baby boy called Reuben on 11th January.
