From the 25-29 Jan 2021 second year student Holly Fraser attended the Psychological Networks Amsterdam Winter School 2021. The winter school provided training in Network Analysis, a methodology used to visualise and explore associations between phenomena at a systems-level. Participants learnt how to implement network estimation algorithms from the leading academics in the field, understand how to map out and infer causal relationships between factors, and learn about the future directions of Network Analysis. The course was delivered via asynchronous learning, with the course hosts and academics on hand via a Slack channel to answer any questions and help through the exercises.

Holly says: 'I attended to learn more about the method so I can apply it to my own work in the future. I did some of my own data analysis alongside the taught activities, and I now feel much more confident to share my findings and results with my research group and plan future publications. I anticipate that I’ll use this method in the initial stages of my PhD, as a means of data exploration and hypothesis generation. The method is a great way to visualise data, so exploring the ALSPAC dataset through network estimation will inform my later machine learning analyses. As this method hasn’t been implemented before in this dataset, there is potential for some exciting future work to arise from this analysis, such as understanding connections between mental health symptoms.  I hope to also collaborate with colleagues from other universities who are interested in using networks to explore mental health.'