General Workshop Information

Online workshop materials

Comments are very much welcome. Please contact Ed Nelson at: ednelson@csufresno.edu.

General information

SSDB Workshop, Sacramento State, March 24, 2006

The Social Science Research and Instructional Council offers workshops on a variety of topics, including Social Science Data Bases, SPSS, and Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA). Presenters will come to your campus (at no charge to CSU campuses) and provide hands-on training. Presenters will help participants with downloading the data files. However, presenters are usually not available to consult on specific research questions.

To date, we have developed the following:

  1. NVivo -- software for text-based analysis (NEW).  
  2. Introduction to the Social Sciences Data Bases (ICPSR, Field, Roper, etc.)
  3. Introduction to SPSS (overview of SPSS, recode, compute, select if, frequencies, descriptives, explore)
  4. Intermediate SPSS (review of intro workshop, crosstabs, comparison of means and one-way ANOVA, t-tests, regression and correlation, graphs)
  5. Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA) (an online statistical analysis package)
  6. Data in the Classroom
  7. Teaching Resources
  8. Integrating Quantitative Literacy Resources into the Classroom

 

Suggestions for host campus representatives

SSDB Workshop, Sacramento State, March 24, 2006

Things SSRIC representatives need to do in preparation for workshops:

  1. Working with your campus center for professional development (or it may be called something else such as the center for teaching and learning) to prepare for the workshop. They will often help you recruit faculty for the workshop. They may be able to provide other incentives such as stipends and materials.
  2. Recruiting faculty for the workshop. Graduate students and staff may also attend, but priority ought to be given to faculty.
  3. Developing and distributing a flyer. See attached flyers (in MS Word format) from workshops at San Bernardino (doc) and Humboldt (doc) as possible models.
  4. Arranging for a lunch for participants and presenters where they can talk and socialize right after the workshop. Hopefully your campus will pay for the lunch.
  5. Arranging for a lab for the workshop. The lab ought to have the following software:
    1. Internet browser. Please check to be sure that Internet Options are set for Passive FTP. (See our Field Poll Guide and scroll sown to "Setting Up Your Browser.")
    2. Microsoft Office including PowerPoint
    3. SPSS (let us know which version)
    4. If Windows XP or later is not the operating system, we will need some type of software to unzip files.
  6. Download data files from the archives to the lab that will be used for the workshop to make sure that downloads are working. See download instructions for ICPSR, Field Polls at the Berkeley site, and Roper. It’s always possible that the lab is not in the IP list we use to authenticate users. That can be fixed, but we need a few days lead time. We will be glad to work with you over the phone on downloading the files. It's also a good idea for participants to bring a flash drive to the wrokshop so that they can take with them any files they've downloaded. This suggestion should be included in the recruitment flyer.

A typical agenda for a workshop often looks like the following. (It can, of course, be modified.)

  • Workshop from 9 am to noon with one break
  • Lunch from noon to 1 pm
  • One-on-one sessions with participants who want to stay and work with the presenters from 1 pm to 2:30 pm

If you would like to discuss the possibility of a workshop, or you have any questions, please write Ed Nelson at ednelson@csufresno.edu.

Resources