Yet another conference: The annual meeting of the communication research methods group in lovely Austria. The presentations were certainly better on average than at WAPOR. Our talk on online sorting studies was well-received, and there seems to be some interest in our super-secret sorting tool.

I especially enjoyed the talks on non-response in surveys (”The main difficulty in non-reponse research is non-response.”) and using SmartPLS for formative measurement models.

This year’s WAPOR conference was nice, although the papers presented varied (too) much in quality for my taste. The presentations by the commercial pollsters seem to be all about sample sizes, post-stratification weights and how to poll in Afghanistan, China or the world at large.

A quick review of the proceedings revealed that only about 8 papers used at least somewhat advanced methods of analysis like multilevel or structural equation models, latent class or time series analysis. There were some large-scale content analyses and cross-national comparisons done, but not many theoretical or conceptual advancements. Maybe WAPOR is not the place for cutting edge research, but then again what is?

Our own paper presentation went pretty smooth, we had nice co-panelists and I got to meet the head of Eurobarometer after complaining about their media use scales, oh well.

T3DD06 was definitely the best conf I’ve been to, and I had a lot of fun meeting all the smart guys from -core and the community. The new TER frontend has finally been deployed and even the most annoying TIMTAB bug was fixed last weekend.

Other news … my thesis has been somewhat neglected lately but I did insane amounts of computation and data presentation last week. In a comparison of 25 countries any small table with 5 regression coefficients takes up a whole page. Not to mention the fun of presenting a dozen goodness-of-fit measures for every model and every country. Cross-national research surely does suck at times.