View on GitHub

kevralston.github.io

A place to host my work

Welcome to Kevin Ralston’s GitHub Pages

I am a Lecturer in Sociology at York St John University.

My research generally involves the study of inequalities and I have published papers examining inequalities in health, occupational and family outcomes.

My PhD examined social group variation in the timing of first birth.

I specialise in teaching quantitative methods. I have also taught substantive topics such as social policy, social theory and social demography.

I believe it is important that sociologists can use representative data and ‘big’ data in examining the social world. In my research I primarily work in the software Stata and R. I teach a lot using SPSS. I am exploring web-science techniques and intend to incorporate Python, Hadoop and SQL into my teaching and analysis.

Take a look at my CV if you like. A list of publications can be found here.

Blog

Along with Dr Roxanne Connelly of Warwick University I curate a social science blog called The Detectives Handbook. The blog showcases research along with empirical and methodological issues in sociology.

Anyone is welcome to submit an article to the blog and we are particularly keen to publish posts by early career researchers.

In 2016 the blog was viewed 951 times from 33 countries.

I also have a personal work related blog, Cloistered Years

Teaching Data Analysis in SPSS

The material for a complete introductory course using SPSS syntax with survey data can be found here: An introduction to data analysis and the research process using SPSS

The course ran for 7 weeks with two three hour lessons per week.