Hello Everyone! My name is Oscar L. Olvera Astivia.
I completed my PhD in Measurement, Evaluation and Research Methodology (MERM) in the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. I am also an affiliated member of the Structural Equation Modeling lab in the Quantitative Methods program in the Psychology Department.
Back in the day I was also a post-doctoral research fellow in the School of Population and Public Health (in UBC) and was the lead data analyst of the Parent & Child Early Coaching Project (PACE)
If MERM sounds a tad bit obscure to you, just think about it as some intersection of Psychometrics, Statistics and research methods for the social sciences, particularly in the fields of Psychology and Education. I tend to gravitate towards the more ‘statistics-oriented’ side of research methods, so I really, really like everything that has to do with data analysis, Monte Carlo simulations, computer algorithms, etc. which goes along with my background in Math/Stats. My areas of expertise are Structural Equation Modelling, linear mixed models, Item Response Theory, etc. Oh! and I am currently in love with Copula Distributions (intro here) which don’t see a lot of love in the social sciences so I’m trying to get them popular!
psychometroscar 