Longitudinal & Time Series Analysis
This class is one of the 300-level courses that I've been developing.
Be careful. The title suggests correctly that the class develops quantitative skills, but the class is about development "too" (or "really"). The key is that most things you find that matter to psychology will grow, age, change, experience, and learn. Heck, I think that's what most things do even outside of psychology. So, this class is not just a data-science/stats class--it is a class about development and specifically about the quantitative tools you might want to model that.
Focusing on how to model developing systems will show that the modeling practices have themselves developed. (Whoa, meta!) As we progress through the class, we get deeper-in and closer-up to the more minute details of a developing process. Gradually, we come to grips with much of the history and logic and culture embedded in what are now often thoughtless, automatic choices for data analysis. (Culture and history in our math? YES!) So, as these modeling practices have developed, students discover more and more how much room their is for them to step in to the quantitative modeling process and to take a more assertive and creative role in how to build quantitative models of developing processes.
Click below for further details about
...how we use R for our modeling language and Singer & Willett's textbook for examples and English translations--your expertise in R is not a prerequisite to enrolling, but you will need a sense of adventure and dedication to learn some programming as we go.
...how you will be exploring a dataset for the length of the semester
...what you learn (with student comments in quotes)
...what may surprise you (with student comments in quotes)
...what advice past students would like to give you (with student comments in quotes)