Jörg Blasius is professor of sociology at the University of Bonn. Until 2001 he was Assistant Professor at the Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung, University of Cologne. His research interests are exploratory data analysis, methods of empirical social research, urban sociology and the sociology of lifestyles.
This course introduces the data reduction technique of correspondence analysis (CA). CA is a multivariate method for exploring cross-tabular data by converting such tables into graphical displays, called "maps", and related numerical statistics. The course starts with a detailed introduction to the geometric background of the method. Using several applications from the social sciences, the symmetric and asymmetric presentation of maps as well as the numerical results will be examined in detail. Besides simple and multiple correspondence analysis, the course will give an overview of joint correspondence analysis and related scaling techniques, such as principal components analysis and multidimensional scaling. Furthermore, there will be discussion of the analysis of various types of data via CA, for instance time dependent data such as panel and trend data and multi-response data. Finally, the course compares log-linear analysis as a model-driven approach to analysing categorical data with an exploratory type of data reduction such as CA.
Participants are invited to bring their own data.
The Software used are SPSS (module CATEGORIES) and SimCA (a stand-alone program written by Michael Greenacre).
A working understanding of descriptive statistics is sufficient, but it would be helpful if participants have some understanding of multidimensional scaling and principal components analysis. An elementary knowledge of inferential statistics is recommended, especially the chi-square-test of independence for a contingency table.