Spring 2026 Colloquia

Monday, March 30, 2026

Designing and Managing Nonprobability Panels: A Practitioner’s Perspective

ABSTRACT: The Bovitz nonprobability panel, originally built for consumer market research, has gained significant traction among academics conducting population-based survey experiments.  This talk provides a behind-the-scenes look at how the panel is designed and managed to meet researchers’ expectations around representativeness and respondent engagement, highlighting key design decisions, quality control practices, and the practical tradeoffs inherent in nonprobability sampling.  The presentation will include key panel metrics along with empirical results from select studies.

Dr. Greg Bovitz, founder and CEO of Bovitz, Inc.

Monday, April 6, 2026

A Dynamic Dyadic Systems Approach for Analysis of Conversations: Reconsiderations and Possible Routes Forward

ABSTRACT: Conversations between people are where stressors are amplified and attenuated, conflicts are entrenched and resolved, and goals are advanced and thwarted. What happens in dyads' back-and-forth exchanges to produce such consequential and varied outcomes? Although numerous theories in communication and in social psychology address this question, empirical tests of these theories often operationalize conversational behavior using either discrete messages or overall features of the conversation. Dynamic systems theories and methods provide opportunities to examine the interdependency, self-stabilization, and self-organization processes that manifest in conversations over time. In this talk I review how our Dynamic Dyadic Systems (DDS; Solomon et al, 2023)) approach emerged, the hurdles we encountered, and how the temporal analysis frameworks might be extended.

Nilam Ram, Professor of Psychology and Communication, Stanford University

Monday, April 13, 2026

Soubhik Barari, Senior Research Methodologist, University of Chicago NORC

Monday, April 20, 2026

Gretchen Engbring, Sustainability Social Scientist, Stanford University Office of Sustainability

Sebastian Pintea, Environmental Systems Engineering BS Candidate, Stanford University 

Monday, April 27, 2026

Sara Constantino, Assistant Professor, Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability

Monday, May 11, 2026

Steven Kull, Director of the Program for Public Consultation (PPC), University of Maryland

Monday, May 18, 2026

Siwar Aslih, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz