Survey data

IASSIST Professional Developement Committee organizes and hosts IASSIST Community Webinars. Webinars usually last about 45-60 minutes. Some of the topics have for example been data visualization, qualitative analysis tools, and data curation. Webinars are recorded and made available on the IASSIST YouTube Channel.

At GESIS we offer a wide range of events, especially training courses on empirical social research methods. Our theory founded and hands-on courses develop participants’ methods skills and are aimed at both early career and senior researchers from Germany, Europe, and the whole world.

Synergies for Europe's Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences (SERISS) is a four-year project that aims to strengthen and harmonise social science research across Europe. It brings together leading European Research Infrastructures in the social sciences - ESS, the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE ERIC) and Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA ERIC) - alongside organisations representing the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP), European Values Study (EVS) and the WageIndicator Survey.

Focused around three key themes – key challenges facing cross-national data collection, breaking down barriers between research infrastructures, and embracing the future of social sciences – SERISS will address issues relating to survey design and data collection, data management and curation from a collaborative, cross-national perspective. The project will better equip Europe’s social science data infrastructures to play a major role in addressing the key societal challenges facing Europe today and ensure that national and European policymaking is built on a solid base of the highest-quality socio-economic evidence.

SERISS has developed a suite of online tools, webinars and lectures to provide training on data management, data handling and harmonisation, as well as on statistical analysis to a wider social science community.  

easySHARE is a simplified HRS-adapted dataset for student training, and for researchers who have little experience in quantitative analyses of complex survey data. While the main release of SHARE is stored in more than 100 single data files, easySHARE stores information on all respondents and of all currently released data collection waves in one single dataset. Moreover, for the subset of variables covered in easySHARE, the complexity was considerably reduced. For example the information collected only from one person of a couple or in a household was transferred to all respective respondents; time constant information collected only in the first interview was transferred to all later interviews; the coding of missing values was enriched to provide an easier understanding of the routing and filtering of the interviews; etc. In addition, several ready to analyse variables have been added, such as health indexes, demographic information, or economic measures. When possible measures have been selected or recoded to facilitate comparative analyses with the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS).

Youtube playlist of past webinars organised by the UK Data Service. Topics include:

• mapping crime data in R
• longitudinal data
• census and population data
• getting started with secondary analysis
• data management
• how to anonymise quantitative and qualitative data
• working with twitter data
• web scraping
• consent issues in data sharing

The workshop will cover the ethical and operational issues associated with linking Twitter and survey data. We will begin by thinking about what new and exciting opportunities this new form of linked data provides. We will then move on to the challenges associated with designing, collecting, analyzing, publishing and sharing this type of linked data. Drawing on recent experiences of three UK studies (British Social Attitudes 2015, the Understanding Society Innovation Panel 2017 (IP10) and the NatCen Panel July 2017) we will explore issues around informed consent, disclosure, security and archiving. The workshop will be interactive with a focus on participant engagement and dialogue.

Please note, this is an example of a possible workshop. Some workshops are offered regularly. An updated workshop list is to be found under the link provided under the Access point.

Practical tutorials to manage and handle research data for particular software packages: SPSS, R, ArcGIS and N-Vivo. Tutorials contain many practical exercises.