The University of Essex in the United Kingdom and Center for Positive/Empirical Analysis of Political Economy at Waseda University co-organized the Essex Summer School at WASEDA from September 9 to 20.This year, the summer school offered two courses, “Maximum Likelihood” and “Quantitative Text Analysis”. Both courses were taught in English. “Maximum Likelihood” was designed for graduate students/senior undergraduate students who had completed intermediate statistics and regression analysis in the social sciences. “Quantitative Text Analysis” was an advanced course for students who had completed the contents in “Maximum Likelihood.” In addition, free tutorials for R were offered for students who were not familiar with the software on September 2 before the courses started.
Dr. Nicole Baerg and Dr. Daina Chiba
“Maximum Likelihood” was taught by Dr. Daina Chiba, and “Quantitative Text Analysis” was taught by Dr. Nicole Baerg. Both of them are young active professors from the Department of Government at the University of Essex, and they have published in top journals in political science, for example, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Science Research and Methods.In the“Maximum Likelihood” course, students learned how to build a statistical model to explain the variation of a categorical dependent variable such as voting behaviors and occupation choices e.g., logit models, and multinomial logit models. In the “Quantitative Text Analysis” course, students learned how to extract quantitative information from text for social scientific purposes e.g., classical content analysis, dictionary-based methods, classification methods, scaling methods, topic models, and word embeddings. In both courses, R was used to conduct empirical analysis. Upon completion, the students received a certificate from the University of Essex.
⇒Essex Summer School at WASEDA 2019
More detailed information on the courses can be found here
A reception was also held after the final exams on September 20, and the instructors and students from the courses together celebrated the successful completion of the summer school. During the reception, both instructors and some students commented about the courses. One student who took “Quantitative Text Analysis” commented that, “Although I bought a book on text analysis and tried to study it by myself, the key points and empirical details were not clear enough. Taking this course, I now understand the key points and detail empirical procedures more clearly.
The Center for Positive/Empirical Analysis of Political Economy is one of the seven model units of the Waseda Goes Global Plan selected by the Top Global University Project. The Center hopes to expand and continue this program annually.
