In December 2002, I circulated an e-mail message to graduate students containing the following text:

For five consecutive Mondays, starting on Monday, January 13, I plan to offer informal one hour workshops for interested graduate students. The sessions will be held from noon to 1:00 pm in Scott 212.

Each workshop will treat an analytical tool that is useful to political research but that does not seem to be covered in the existing structure of courses. I expect students to bring bag lunches to these informal sessions and to ask questions during my talks. Here is the schedule of offerings, all of which will run from 12:00 sharp to 1:00 pm sharp.

• Jan. 13 -- Content Analysis: basic methods for comparing political texts
• Jan. 20 -- Factor analysis: searching for structure among variables
• Jan. 27 -- Scale construction: assessing reliability in measurement
• Feb. 3 -- Discriminant Analysis: an alternative to logistic regression
• Feb. 10 -- Canonical Analysis: computing one correlation between two sets of variables

I do not presume to teach anyone how to become proficient in using any of these tools in just one hour. My goal is to (1) acquaint people with the potential uses of the tools so that they can decide whether they have applicability to their research problems, and (2) to direct people to learn more about the tools if they wish.

At each workshop, I will provide handouts with major points, further readings, and so on. If you have any interest in attending any of these sessions, please reply briefly stating your main field of research. I'll try to pitch my talks to the interest of those who are likely to attend.

If no one replies, I'll assume that there's no need to discuss these topics. If people do reply, I'll target future e-mails about the workshops only to those who do.