2025 Meeting of the SEM Working Group at the TU Chemnitz
The next meeting of the SEM Working Group will take place on 19-21 March 2025 at the TU Chemnitz. The meeting is organized by Prof. Dr. Jochen Mayerl and Dr. Henrik Andersen of the University of Technology Chemnitz, Institut of Sociology and in cooperation with the Methods Competency Center (Methodenkompetenzzentrum, MKZ).
Keynote addresses will be given by Prof. Bart Meuleman (KU Leuven) and Prof. Jost Reinecke (University of Bielefeld) together with Prof. Peter Schmidt (University of Giessen).
There is no conference fee. Participation is free for active and passive participants.
Conference Programme
The preliminary conference programme can be found here.
Pre-Conference Workshop
Prof. Yves Rosseel (University of Ghent), author of the lavaan package for SEM in R, will be giving a pre-conference workshop on the Structural After Measurements Approach to Structural Equation Modeling. The workshop will take place from 14:00-17:00 on 19 March, 2025. Both speakers and passive participants are invited to take part in the workshop. Use the link below to register.
Registration
The conference, as well as the pre-conference workshop by Yves Rosseel is open to passive participants. Please register via the following form. Therein you can select what parts of the conference you would like to participate in.
Contact
For questions and concerns, please contact local organizer Henrik Andersen (henrik.andersen@soziologie.tu-chemnitz.de).
Past Conferences
"Open Science and Replicability in the Behavioural Social Sciences" Conference of MethodenKompetenzZentrum, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Science, Chemnitz University of Technology, 30 April 2021 
Welcome to the official website of the virtual Open Science conference “Open Science and Replicability in the Behavioural Social Sciences”, which was be hosted by the University of Technology, Chemnitz (Germany, 30 April 2021).
Open Science practices offer increasing access to open data and research literature. Further, research processes including all steps of statistical analysis are becoming more transparent. Open Science also promises to have an impact on fundamental procedures in peer review processes (incl. pre-registration and avoidance of publication bias) as well as transparency and replicability of research processes and results. In addition, Open Science increases the possibility for international collaboration even during the ongoing research process and enables a large number of researchers to join forces and work together on one research question.
To ensure that these exciting contributions and the accumulation of this body of knowledge on this important timely topic are not lost, all contributions will - as far as possible - be made available to the scientific community on the Open Science platform OSFMEETINGS (https://osf.io/meetings/OSCTUC2021/). Below you will also find the video recordings of the keynotes, the conference programme and participants by region.
Prof. Simine Vazire, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences “Where are the self-correcting mechanisms in science?“
We often hear the self-correcting mechanisms in science invoked as a reason to trust science, but it is not always clear what these mechanisms are. Some quality control mechanisms, such as peer review for journals, or vetting for textbooks or for public dissemination, have recently been found not to provide much of a safeguard against invalid claims. Instead, I argue that we should look for visible signs of a scientific community's commitment to self-correction. These signs include transparency in the research and peer review process, and investment in error detection and quality control. I describe some specific examples of transparency and quality control practices. We should trust scientific claims more to the extent that they were produced by communities that have these hallmarks of credibility. Fields that are more transparent and engage in more criticism and correction should earn more trust. Meta-science can provide scientists and the public with valuable information in assessing the credibility of scientific fields.
Prof. Dr. Katrin Auspurg, Chair of Quantitative Empirical Research,LMU Munich, Germany “How to Further Replicability in Social Research Using Observational Data“
Since several years, psychology has its so-called credibility crisis: Many results of experimental studies coult not be replicated by other scientists. In other disciplines this discussion has gained considerable momentum as well (e.g., economics and medicine). In this talk we will first discuss that there are good reasons to believe that social sciences that use non-experimental, observational data also have a credibility problem. Faulty results likely result from errors or misspecifications of regression models. These credibility problems were probably mostly overseen because most replication audits so far focused on experimental data. Using the example of sociology, we will illustrate the missing credibility of studies based on observational data by some examples: There is meanwhile some evidence for low reproducibility of sociological research and questionable research practices seemingly have been widely used. In the main part of the talk we will then argue that credible social sciences need to be more transparent, open, and replicating. We will suggest several measures by which such open science practices could be furthered. A common theme will be that open science practices show features of a social dilemma. Therefore, moral appeals alone will not be sufficient. We additionally need changes of institutions that increase the opportunities and incentives for open science practices.
