The Quality of Recent Pacific Sociological Association (PSA) Meetings: Location,Session Quality and Institutional Change

Employing data (n?=?734) collected from those having attended the Pacific Sociological Association (PSA) annual meetings held in San Diego, California (2012) and Reno, Nevada (2013), we test whether session quality and host-city satisfaction are positively associated with how respondents rated the overall quality of the meetings. A majority (54 %) of respondents reported the quality of the meetings highly (“Above Average” or “Excellent”), and suggestive of the importance of conference location, this declined from 64 % in 2012 to 41 % in 2013. Controlling for individual characteristics and institutional affiliation, regression results intimate that both host-city satisfaction and session quality are positively associated with how respondents rated the overall quality of the meetings. And they suggest that the former is somewhat more important than the latter for explaining variation in meeting quality. A final stage of our analysis (n?=?205) finds that attendees’ evaluations of changes in how the 2013 PSA meetings were developed and organized are positively associated with meeting quality without diminishing the independent effects of session or location quality. We discuss implications of these results for future PSA meetings, as well as for research investigating how to improve the quality of regional academic conferences more generally.