The Flourishing Statistical Environment: How Can We Tell?

The Vanderbilt ‘Distinguished Women in Statistics’ seminar series seeks to showcase leadership, insights and soft skills required to lead and manage, make visible current women leaders in statistics, and highlight their career trajectories and accomplishments. The present talk aims to meet these goals through consideration of the “flourishing” statistical environment—a designation associated with the Marvin Zelen Leadership in Statistics award. Here, “flourish[ing]” can be thought of as a social science “construct”—to paraphrase Cronbach’s and Meehl’s (1955) classic definition, a postulated attribute of an environment, assumed to be reflected in its properties. We begin by considering a statistical approach to construct operationalization, including measurement validation and latent variable modeling as a means to evaluate this. We exemplify the approach through application to health constructs in psychiatry and aging. An application to operationalization of “flourishing” in the statistical environment then is proposed, through which leadership insights are addressed. The presentation aims to highlight the importance of measurement as an evaluative activity, report associated statistical advancements, and spur conversation on diagnosing, influencing and tracking our organizations’ and field’s health in future years.

MRBIII, Room 1220
10 April 2019
1:30pm