Student Seminar Series

Archive of seminars for past quarters.

CSSS Student Seminars
Friday, December 4, 3:00 to 5:00pm
Gowen Hall 1A

Time Presenter Department Title
3:00-3:30pm Amanda Clayton Political Science "Comparative Occupational Communities: The Case of Unions"
3:30-4:00pm Ashley Thirkill-Mackelprang Political Science "TBA"
4:00-4:30pm Pizza break
4:30-5:00pm Various Various CSSS Winter Course Presentations
5:15pm CSSS pub night
College Inn
4000 University Way NE

Abstracts:

1. Amanda Clayton, Department of Political Science, Method(s): Spatial Analysis.
Comparative Occupational Communities: The Case of Unions

Why do MUA and ILWU members actively commit themselves to social justice causes when the effects of these campaigns will only tangentially affect their livelihoods if at all? These actions are in contrast to the more traditional business unions, such as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) in which collective action is solely used as a tool to promote issues that directly affect the members. Margaret Levi et al. (2009) emphasize the importance of an organizational culture, which is created by strong leaders and perpetuated by their institutional legacies, in shaping the preferences of the members. A secondary institution that reinforces this organizational culture, I argue, is the choice of members to live in occupational communities. Living in close proximity to one another creates a forum through which members exchange information and exert social pressure so that the majority have preferences which are aligned with those deemed the most acceptable by the community.

I use the Global Information Systems (GIS) Arc Map Version 9 to map the residence patterns of three unions involved in the transport sector: the ILWU and the IBT in the United States and the MUA in Australia. The maps show the communities that were most populated by union members during the unions’ inception (1940’s) and their current patterns. Furthermore, I calculate Local Moran's I values for clusters of zip codes with values similar in magnitude to identify spatial outliers.

2. Ashley Thirkill-Mackelprang, Department of Political Science. Method(s): Event History Analysis
TBA

Abstract: Forthcoming

3. Additional Contributors who will speak about a selection of WINTER 2010 courses.

  • Amanda Allen and Bailey Draper: Applied Regression (To be taught by Adrian Raftery)
  • Kristan Seibel: Event History Analysis (To be taught by Darryl Holman) and CSSCR courses
  • Taedong Lee: Statistical Analysis of Social Networks
  • Brian Greenhill: Visualizing Data

About CSSS Student Seminars:

The CSSS student seminar is an informal meeting open to all UW graduate students with interests in interdisciplinary quantitative social science research. The seminar aims to create a friendly supportive environment for students of all disciplines and all levels of technical sophistication to learn from each other. It serves this function in two ways:

(1) By providing a venue for students to practice giving a 'conference style' presentation, present their research at any stage, and receive feedback from fellow graduate students.

(2) By fostering a cross-disciplinary community of graduate students with interests in quantitative research. Fellow graduate students are a great resource for learning about new methods and statistical techniques, and for discussing the 'every day' problems one confronts in research. C6S is a forum for dialogue with and feedback from students in other disciplines. It can be very useful to talk with researchers studying similar questions through other disciplinary lenses, or to see familiar methods used in different disciplinary contexts.

The student presenter is encouraged to talk about their research for ~20 minutes, leaving 10 minutes for questions, feedback, and discussion.

To get a wide range of speakers and participants from different departments, students of different departments act as coordinators. Currently the coordinators are:

Anthropology Siobhan Mattison smc56@u.washington.edu
Epidemiology Kristin Miller kamiller@u.washington.edu
Geography Arnisson Andre Ortega aaortega@u.washington.edu
Political Science Francisco Pedraza fpedraza@u.washington.edu
Psychology Mara Sedlins sedlins@u.washington.edu
School of Social Work Xiang Gao gaoxiang@u.washington.edu
Sociology Kerry MacQuarrie kerry10@u.washington.edu
Sociology Mark Wine marcox@u.washington.edu
Statistics Gail Potter gail@stat.washington.edu

We encourage involvement of all departments with interests in research that deals with statistical issues in the social sciences. If you are interested in being a coordinator for your department, send an email to fpedraza@u.washington.edu.

If you are interested in presenting at the seminar, read the guidelines and send an email with a short abstract of your talk to the coordinator of your department or to fpedraza@u.washington.edu.