Generalizing the Regression Model: Techniques for Longitudinal and Contextual Analysis

This comprehensive text introduces regression, the general linear model, structural equation modeling, the hierarchical linear model, growth curve models, panel data, and event history models, and includes discussion of published implementations of each technique showing how it was used to address substantive and interesting research questions. It takes a step-by-step approach in the presentation of each topic, using mathematical derivations where necessary, but primarily emphasizing how the methods involved can be implemented, are used in addressing representative substantive problems than span a number of disciplines, and can be interpreted in words. The book demonstrates the analyses in STATA and SAS. Generalizing the Regression Model provides students with a bridge from the classroom to actual research practice and application.

Blair Wheaton is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1976, and taught at Yale University and McGill University before moving to the University of Toronto in 1989. He has taught graduate and undergraduate statistics courses for most of his career.

He was the first recipient of  the Leonard I. Pearlin Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Sociology of′ Mental Health in 2000, and received the “Best Publication” Award from the Mental Health section of the American Sociological Association in 1996. He was one of fifteen researchers selected as a member of the Consortium for Research in Stress Processes, funded by the W.T. Grant Foundation, a group that met  which met for ten years (1984-1994) and produced three influential books on stress research over that period. He was elected to the Sociological Research Association in 2010.

His research focuses on both the life course and social contextual approach to understanding mental health over multiple life stages. Currently, he is following up a family study that included interviews of 9-16 year old children from 1993-1996 to investigate the long-term consequences of growing up in gender-egalitarian households on work, family, and health outcomes, he is developing a method for gathering a life history residential profile of neighborhood environments, from birth to the present, he is conducting research on the long-term positive benefits of maternal employment histories on their children into middle adulthood, and he is writing papers on the impact of 9/11 on the subjective welfare of Americans, on causality and its renderings by various methods, and on the reasons for the persistence of findings in research literatures that could be fundamentally misleading.