Participants: 12 people
Fee: $100 per day or $500 for the week

The Graduate School of Human Behavior announces its forth annual seminar in Cross-Cultural Psychology.

The goal of this intensive Seminar will be to provide participants with the experience of designing, conducting, and completing a cross-cultural research project. The seminar will include didactic, lecture style sessions with discussion, and practical sessions involving reading research articles, improving critical thinking skills, designing a study, data entry and management, analyzing data and interpreting findings, and presenting results. The 2005 seminar will blend theory and practice into a unique teaching and learning combination that will be beneficial for beginners and advanced researchers alike. The seminar will be co-Taught by Dr. David Matsumoto, noted researcher in the cross-cultural area, and Dr. Jeff LeRoux, President of the Graduate School of Human Behavior. This seminar is normally attended by scholars from Japan and Korea as well as local students and researchers. The seminar is ideal for clinicians who want to conduct or better understand research in multi-cultural or cross-cultural settings.

The seminar will be held in Berkeley, California from February 29th to March 5th. Professionals licensed by the Board of behavioral Sciences can receive 5 hours of Continuing Education credit for each day. Students who complete the seminar will have the option of receiving 3 credits toward a doctoral degree from the Graduate School of Human Behavior by attending but enrollment as a doctoral student is not required.

Feb. 27th (Sunday) 17:00-19:00 - Opening Party (evening)

March 2nd (Wednesday) 10:00-16:00- Introduction to Data Analysis (Dr. David Matsumoto);

Data Processing and Management Practicum (Seung Hee Yoo)

March 3rd (Thursday) 10:00-16:00 - Data Analysis (Dr. Jeff LeRoux; Seung Hee Yoo)

In the first session, participants will learn about cross-cultural research methodology. The seminar will start with critical reading of research articles assigned before the seminar begins. We will discuss the importance of literature reviews and evaluation of the literature in designing studies, and the basics of experimental, quasi-experimental designs, and correlational designs. We will also spend considerable time on issues specifically related to cross-cultural research, including equivalence, language and translation issues, sampling, and unpackaging. Students will be given homework to design their own studies.

This class focuses on classical approaches to construction of reliable and valid measures of psychological topics. First we will review basic ideas about the theory of test construction then we will practice the skills involved in test construction. Each student will pick a topic for a psychological test and partially go through the steps of constructing an instrument to measure it. By the end of the day each student should have both a grasp of the basic processes of test construction and a plan of how to go about constructing a test to measure one idea of interest to them.

This class will focus on basic principles of data analysis. We will describe and discuss the role of statistics in data analysis, and the types of statistics available for use. We will also discuss the decision tree to use when choosing the appropriate statistic. We will also spend considerable time learning about mediation analysis in unpackaging cross-cultural studies. The second half of the class will be spent in practicum, with participants learning to enter and manage data, and conduct preliminary data analyses.

Students will be provided with data sets to do mock analyses of their projects that they designed. The entire day will be spent in practicum analyzing data and addressing research hypotheses.

On the final day of the seminar we will discuss the interpretations of all results generated. The seminar will end with 12-minute, conference-like presentations of the research findings by all participants. The presentations should include an introduction, method, results, and discussion of the study.

Jeffrey A. LeRoux is President of the Graduate School of Human Behavior.  He earned his B.A. degree from the University of Oregon, his M.Ed. from Oregon State University and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.   He has studied emotion and psychological measurement for many years and has been teaching research design for fifteen years.  He is the author of numerous professional articles and presentations and co-author of the Intercultural Adjustment Potential Scale as well as serving as an international business consultant.

For further information, please contact Takako Miyashita the registrar at the Graduate School of Human Behavior

Email: takakomy@aol.com (English and Japanese)