The Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice invites you to join us for the first Statistical Applications in Criminology and Criminal Justice (SACC) lecture this year on Thursday, October 20th, from 11:00am-12:30pm. Professor Tracy Sweet will give a talk on Network Analysis.

About the Speaker:

Tracy Sweet is an Associate Professor in the Measurement, Statistics and Evaluation program in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology.  She completed her Ph.D. in Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University and a M.A. in Mathematics at Morgan State University. Her research focuses on methods for social network analysis with particular focus on multilevel social network models. Recent projects include network interference, measurement error, and missing data. She serves as the Associate Director of Research for UMCP for the Maryland Longitudinal Data System Center and is currently overseeing projects applying data science and statistical methods to large-scale educational data. Finally, Dr. Sweet is committed to improving diversity in the fields of statistics and quantitative methodology. She serves on the DEI committee for her department and the College's Council on Racial Equity and Justice, and she is interested in exploring how race and ethnicity is analyzed in quantitative methods.

Abstract:

A social network is broadly defined as the measure or presence of a specific relationship among a group of individuals or entities, and these types of networks naturally occur in the social sciences. Because of the atypical format relational data that violate independence assumptions, the methods used to analyze social network data are not taught in traditional data analysis courses. In this talk, I will discuss some common methods for analyzing social network data.