Source: Sun Yat-sen Business School
Written by: External Liaison Office of Sun Yat-sen Business School
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

On June 7, the 2014 Annual SYSBS Methodological Workshop was held at Sun Yat-sen Business School (SYSBS). The theme for this year's Workshop was "Advanced Modeling with Longitudinal Data: Theorization and Test", and it was the first nationwide workshop on this topic presented in the Chinese language. In attendance were more than 160 professors and post-graduate students from 8 universities in the U.S., Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan as well as 28 universities in mainland China.

The aim of the Workshop centered on systematically providing Chinese scholars with conceptual fundamentals, theory-building and statistical models relating to longitudinal data in the management and organization field. In addition, the Workshop offered insights into how to build and test related statistical models with software MPLUS, as well as how to report and interpret the related results.

Lead speakers and instructors for the Workshop were Dr. Mo Wang, Professor of Management and Co-Director of the Human Resource Research Center, Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida, and Dr. Zhen Zhang, Associate Professor of Management at the W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. The two professors enlightened the scholars in attendance with a vivid presentation reviewing the theorization and testing of various models using longitudinal data.

The Workshop provided an informative guide for researchers to better model longitudinal data. The participants have learned numerous examples from the organizational and psychological literatures to review various research questions that can be addressed with modeling longitudinal data. The Workshop speakers also offered specific conceptual and empirical instructions including Mplus syntaxes to illustrate various ways for modeling longitudinal data.