Facet Theory Association's 11th Biennial International Conference

Newswise — The Facet Theory Association (FTA) will hold its 11th Biennial International Conference at Temple University, Aug. 6"9. An international scholarly society, this conference is the first to be held by FTA in the United States. Previous conferences have been in Europe or in Israel, where the association was founded.

The conference, sponsored by Temple's College of Education, is organized by FTA president-elect Frank Farley, a Laura H. Carnell Professor at Temple, and Scientific Program Chair Arie Cohen, a visiting professor from Israel. Farley is the association's first president from the United States.

Facet Theory, which was developed in Israel by the late Louis Guttman, an American-born social psychologist who was founder of the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research and a professor at Cornell University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a systematic approach for coordinating theory and research.

Facet Theory techniques and concepts have been valuable in many areas of behavioral and social science, bringing new insights to the fields of work and organizations, marketing, education, health, psychology, psychiatry, medicine, communications, architecture and biology, to name only a few. During the August conference at Temple, specific methodological techniques such as smallest-space analysis and multidimensional scaling will be reported on in a variety of applications, and available computer programs for these techniques will be reviewed. These techniques identify structures in wide varieties of data with minimal assumptions about the nature of those data.

Conference sessions will be held in Ritter Hall, room 211, 1301 Cecil B. Moore Ave. The Temple University community is invited and encouraged to attend, as are all faculty, students and interested individuals in the Philadelphia area.

Among the conference highlights: ● August 7, 1 p.m. — Keynote address by Rutgers University Board of Governors Professor of Management and Psychology J. Douglas Carroll, "Multidimensional Scaling and its Extensions: Applications to Perceptual, Preferential Choice, and other Behavioral Science Data." ● August 7, 3 p.m. — World renowned statistician Dr. Joseph B. Kruskal, a leader in multidimensional scaling among other accomplishments, will receive FTA's inaugural Louis Guttman Distinguished Lifetime Contribution Award. ● August 7, 4 p.m. — A session reflecting on the legacy and contributions of Louis Guttman, the originator of Facet Theory, Guttman scale and other methodologies. Guttman's family will participate in this session. A workshop will be offered demonstrating the major computer program in this field with hands-on experience using participants' own data, if they wish. "All scholars and students in such fields as psychology, education, sociology, statistics and related disciplines concerned with scientific theory development, research design, and data analytic methodologies should find the sessions listed above and the whole conference of great interest and value," said Farley.

About Facet Theory According to Facet Theory, most social-behavioral concepts are multivariate, and therefore their study requires a systematic design for defining observations. Moreover, if the definitional design is to lead to cumulative results, it should be in a form that aids perception of systematic relationships with the empirical data.

Guttman created his famous "mapping sentence idea" with the intention of promoting both purposes. A mapping sentence, which is a basic device of Facet Theory, contains a variety of facets. Each facet in the mapping sentence is one way of classifying the research issues, and is specified as having a certain role.

According to Guttman, the general hypothesis of Facet Theory is that the roles of the facets in a mapping sentence provide a rationale for a hypothesis of a correspondence between the definitional framework (the mapping sentence) and an aspect of the empirical data. The many published examples using the facet approach and arriving at structural lawfulness, provide the growing evidence that supports the general hypothesis of Facet Theory.