- performativity - what does saying "honours, recognizes, and respects" *do*? - How does McGill act toward Indigenous communities (local and distant) outside of this statement? - This class -- we'll talk about the role of science in colonial oppression. - What does a statement like this mean for us as the McGill community? As members of this class?
Small class icebreaker - Names - experience with R - Are you already working with a dataset for your thesis or dissertation?
The "linear regression" is a workhorse of social science statistics. It gives us a standard way to relate two variables to each other (and control for other confounding variables) It's great for research because it's a flexible way to talk about quantitative results that allows us to "black box" a lot of complexity into discussion of _coefficients_, _statistical significance_, etc. BUT, linear regressions incorporate a lot of different components in that black box!
Each of these is it's own thing, and can be (in theory) swapped out for something else. (Of course, there are dependencies! Assumptions depend on model and vice versa, e.g.)
In this class we'll be focusing on the models. But in the process we'll look at various ways of estimating those models
We'll use both approaches in this class, though the model descriptions will tend toward the Bayesian