APSA Short Course: Dynamic Process Tracing: A Decision Making Research Tool

Political Psychology Organized Section
2011 APSA Short Course

The APSA Organized Section on Political Psychology is sponsoring a short course on "Dynamic Process Tracing: A Decision Making Research Tool" led by David Redlawsk. This is a follow-on to the course held last year. This year's course will provide an overview of the system and present the significant updates made over the past year that allow easy development of a wide range of experiments in decision making. The system is already in use by researchers in Europe as well as the United States.

The course will be Wednesday afternoon, and registration will be open soon at the APSA website

This year's course will provide an overview of the Lau and Redlawsk Dynamic Process Tracing Environment (DPTE) used for studying individual decision making. Funded in part by the NSF, the system is now available at http://dpte.polisci.uiowa.edu to any researcher interested in making use of it. However, those interested in using DPTE in their research should consider first attending this course in order to learn the system design details and functionality.

Dynamic process tracing is a research technique used to study information search and decision making in an ever-changing information environment. Developed by Lau and Redlawsk to study voter decision making during political campaigns, the technique can be profitably employed to study learning, decision making, and a variety of related processes in nearly any dynamic situation. However, until now, prohibitive programming costs made this technique very difficult for other researchers to use.

Those who attend will learn how to begin their own experiments using the system. The system will be divided into two parts. The first 90 minutes will provide an overview of the system. The second part will examine how to run studies and provide information about the many new features added to the system since last year's class. If you attended last year, you may still want to attend again, perhaps joining us after the 90 minute introductory period, though of course all are welcome for the whole session.

For more information contact Dave Redlawsk at redlawsk@rutgers.edu