
Dr Grant Blank
Departmental Lecturer
Grant Blank's work focuses on the social and cultural implications of the Internet and new media, quantitative and qualitative methods, and cultural sociology. He teaches on the OII social statistics courses.
This course extends ordinary least squares regression. Logistic regression allows prediction of categorical dependent variables (e.g. binary variables like use or non-use of social network sites). This course covers the interpretation of coefficients and odds ratios, measures of fit, supporting graphics, and diagnostics and corrective techniques for common problems. Principal components analysis allows a large number of variables to be summarized in a (much) smaller number of factors. This part of the course will cover construction and interpretation of components as well as contrasts to other techniques like item analysis. The goal of this course is to give students a wider range of techniques that they can apply in their own research.
At the end of the course students will be able to: