Resources

The methods of psychological science

This video gives a 30,000 foot overview of basic concepts from psychological science. It covers how psychologists measure things, and how they assess the quality of measurement instruments. It also addresses the concepts of mediation and moderation, within-person versus between-person relationships, and "internal" versus "external" validity.

What is a p-value?

In science, p-values appear all over the place and are incredibly important. But what are they? What do they tell us? This video explains p-values using an intuitive example involving a tea party.

What is a correlation coefficient?

This video provides a simple, conceptual introduction to correlations, specifically "bivariate" correlations and confidence intervals around estimates of correlation coefficients.

What is regression and what is it for?

This video builds on the one above, explaining how regression models allow researchers to examine the unique or independent associations between predictors and an outcome variable.

Text analysis with GPT models

Across the social sciences, researchers are increasingly turning to text as a form of data. Yet, quantifying large volumes of text rigorously and precisely is incredibly difficult. These videos are from a workshop I gave at the Center for the Study of Adolescent Risk and Resilience at Duke University in February 2024. In the first video, I presented the results of my work on using generative pre-trained tranformers (GPTs) for automated text analysis (or "content coding"). In the second video, I show viewers how to do this themselves.