Second Lecture:  How Sociology Advances Statistics

As Clogg understood, substantive questions sometimes arise in sociology for which there is no ready answer.  To illustrate, consider status, which is thought to increase at an increasing rate with rank on characteristics like beauty and wealth, generating a standard exponential distribution.  But suppose that status arises from multiple characteristics, and suppose further that these characteristics are differently associated (positive, negative, independent).  It was already known that if two characteristics are equally weighted and independent, the ensuing status distribution is Erlang.  But what if two characteristics are perfectly negatively associated?  In this case, the sociological question led to derivation of a new status distribution, which was christened the ring(2)-exponential and which in turn led to two new families of distributions which may prove useful in statistics and in other applications in science and engineering.

PUBLIC LECTURE:
Wednesday, April 3
11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
12:30 p.m. to 12:45 p.m. Follow Up Q&A 
350 Health and Human Development Building, Penn State Main Campus