Author Archives: Simon Jebsen

Introduction to the SOEP

Institution: see Organisers & Acknowledgements

Program of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Elke Holst (SOEP at DIW) and Andrea Schäfer (University of Bremen)

Date:
04.10.2010, 14:00 – 17:30
05.10.2010, 14:00 – 17:30

Room: n.s.

Max. number of participants: 25

Semester periods per week: n.s.

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English

Contents:
The Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) is a longitudinal study of private households in Germany. The panel provides information on all household members and was started in 1984. In 2008, there were more than 11,000 households, and about 20,000 persons sampled. Some of the many topics include household composition, occupational biographies, employment, earnings, health, well being, integration, values, lifestyles, and personality. The course gives an overview of the data structure and the research designs facilitated by longitudinal household studies that go beyond conventional surveys (household analysis, intergenerational analysis, life course research, etc.). In hands-on sessions using Stata, the course provides an applied introduction into the data retrieval, the construction of longitudinal data files, and illustrates some exemplary analyses.

You have to register for the 4th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Questionnaire Design

Institution: see Organisers & Acknowledgements

Program of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Juergen H. P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik (GESIS)
Prof. Dr. Dagmar Krebs (University of Gießen)
Dr. Natalja Menold (GESIS)

Date:
04.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30
05.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30
07.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30
08.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30

Room: n.s.

Max. number of participants: n.s.

Semester periods per week: n.s.

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English/German (depending on participants)

Contents:
The lectures deal with the basic principles which have been established in the best practice of questionnaire design. The theoretical background and current state of research will be demonstrated on examples and practical exercises.

1. Cognitive process and cognitive pretests: Monday, 4 October, 9 – 12.30

For the beginning the cognitive process in survey responding, including comprehension, retrieval, judgement and formatting response will be presented. For each of these phases the demands for questionnaire design related to the questions about attitudes, opinions and behavior will be explicated. It will be shown, how cognitive pretest techniques (think aloud, probing, confidence rating, paraphrasing) can help to detect the problems in questionnaires, which were related to the cognitive burden of the respondents.

2. Context effects and question wording: Tuesday, 5 October, 9 – 12.30

This section deals with the impact of situational context given in questionnaires on judgements/answers. Regarding the principles of question wording topics such as to phrase the questions, usage of terms and problems with hypothetical, suggestive, negative and double-barreled questions were attended. For each of the principles examples of problems and their solutions will be given.

3. Constructing of optimal answer formats: Thursday, 7 October, 9 – 12.30

Constructing of optimal answer formats due the reliability and validity of questions includes topics such as number of scale points, midpoint, usage of unipolare and bipolare scales, labels of scale points, ascending and descending sequences. Related topics are handling of open and closed questions and usage of non-opinion filters. The problems and their solutions are demonstrated with help of examples and exercises.

4. Collection of sociodemographic data: Friday, 8 October, 9 – 12.30

The fourth part of this lesson demonstrate how to harmonise demographic and socio-economic variables in cross-national comparative survey research. Demographic and socio-economic variables describe the context in which a person is acting. In cross-national comparable research standardised instruments or indices exist only for a very small group of variables. Aside from these instruments there are rules for developing further measurement instruments for measuring socio-demographic variables in cross-national research.

You have to register for the 4th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Qualitative Inquiry and Content Analysis with MAXQDA

Institution: see Organisers & Acknowledgements

Program of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Heiko Grunenberg (Deutsches Jugendforschungsinstitut)

Date:
07.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30
08.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30

Room: n.s.

Max. number of participants: 20

Semester periods per week: n.s.

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English/German (depending on participants)

Contents:
MAXqda is a software to analyse textual data in a qualitative (but also quantitative) way. The course provides a basic introduction into the logic of the program and its broad possibilities. The goal is to enable you to use this tool accordingly to your own method of analysis. For this reason, everybody can practice our working-steps at an own Computer. We will start at the very beginning and learn about the basic features of the program such as preperation and import of texts, basic analysis strategies and creation of codes, memos and variables. After this, we will focus on anaylsis strategies, simple and complex text retrivals. At the end, we will take a short excusion into the quantitative content analysis of counting and numbers.

You have to register for the 4th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Qualitative (Expert) Interviews

Institution: see Organisers & Acknowledgements

Program of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Heiko Grunenberg (Deutsches Jugend Institut München)

Date:
04.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30
05.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30

Room: n.s.

Max. number of participants: 20

Semester periods per week: n.s.

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English/German (depending on participants)

Contents:
The workshop addresses participants who are quite unexperienced in procedures of conducting qualitative interviews. We want to do some exercises in the theory and the practice of interviewing. Thus, we want to see: What are the main postulates in this kind of qualitative research and what are the most frequent mistakes?

At the first, we will build are theoretical basement. What are the characteristics of qualitative and quantitative interviewing? You will learn about the different kinds of interviews and the variety of questions. (This part is hold in German, because it depends on the grammar of every language!) Furthermore, the course covers a broader view of the specifics of interviews with so called experts. You will practice to conduct own “public” interviews based on your research and will collect several routine in conducting qualitative interviews.

You have to register for the 4th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Data Analysis with R – Reproducible Research

Institution: see Organisers & Acknowledgements

Program of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Detlef Steuer (HSU Hamburg)

Date:
04.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30
05.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30
07.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30
08.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30

Room: n.s.

Max. number of participants: 20

Semester periods per week: n.s.

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English/German (depending on participants)

Contents:
Starting with a basic level introduction to R and its concepts the course will cover typical problems arising in research using statistical tools. Focus will be on the tool R itself, not on the underlying statistics. Nevertheless procedures for descriptive statistics, regression, and time series analysis methods will be given in the examples. Following a ‘natural’ workflow for statisticians the course will cover reading (and cleaning) data, generating graphs and reports, defining functions for repetitive work and keeping research reproducible.

You have to register for the 4th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Teaching Skills: How to Implement Activating Methods Appropriately

Institution: see Organisers & Acknowledgements

Program of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Verena Brenner (Self-Employed Trainer) & Tatjana Reiber (HSU Hamburg)

Date: 06.10.2010, 09:00 – 17:30

Room: n.s.

Max. number of participants: 20

Semester periods per week: n.s.

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: German

Contents:
Although independence and personal initiative are considered key competencies in academia, teaching at university level does often amount to the transfer of knowledge from an expert (the lecturer) to a passively absorbing audience (the students). Participants of this course will get to know various activating methods and teaching strategies, which encourage students to study autonomously and self-determined. A strong focus will be set on the appropriate use of these methods: for which objectives, in which course context and for which target group can a method be applied? Furthermore, participants will have time and opportunity to practice the instruction of several methods.

You have to register for the 4th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Multilevel Modeling

Institution: see Organisers & Acknowledgements

Program of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Roel de Jong (University of Hamburg)

Date: 06.10.2010, 09:00 – 17:30

Room: n.s.

Max. number of participants: 25

Semester periods per week: n.s.

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English/German (depending on participants)

Contents:
Many research designs in the social, medical and biological sciences yield data that have a hierarchical, nested or clustered structure. Examples include pupils within classes, children within families, occasions within an individual, experiments within batches, tests within laboratories, and so on. Classic statistical techniques fail to take into account that observations from the same cluster are likely to be dependent on each other, and are therefore not suited to analyze such data. Multilevel models have been developed over the last 20 years as an alternative, and are now the de-facto standard for the analysis of data with these complex patterns of variability.

In this course, you will learn :

  • About the structure of multilevel models.
  • How to ascertain the degree to which the observations of the sample are dependent.
  • How to specify and fit multilevel models using statistical software.
  • How to perform statistical tests relevant to the hypotheses at hand.

You have to register for the 4th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Network Analysis

Institution: see Organisers & Acknowledgements

Program of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Anja Iseke (University of Paderborn)

Date: 06.10.2010, 09:00 – 17:30

Room: n.s.

Max. number of participants: 25

Semester periods per week: n.s.

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English/German (depending on participants)

Contents:
This course will familiarize students with basic concepts in social network analysis. Topics include handling network data, introduction to network analysis software (UCINET and Netdraw), centrality and prestige in networks, subgroup analysis, and roles and positions. This is an applied course that will require students to test and analyze social networks of employees in a high-tech organization.

You have to register for the 4th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Data Analysis with Stata (Beginners)

Institution: see Organisers & Acknowledgements

Program of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Tobias Gramlich (University of Duisburg-Essen)

Date:
04.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30
05.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30
07.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30
08.10.2010, 09:00 – 12:30

Room: n.s.

Max. number of participants: 20

Semester periods per week: n.s.

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS 2009

Language of instruction: English/German (depending on participants)

Contents:
Stata is a statistical program package widely used (not only) in the social and economical sciences; it is used for data management, statistical graphics and analysis of quantitative data. Statistical concepts will not be part of the course, so participants should have some very basic knowledge of statistics. The course should enable participants to prepare their data for analysis, perform adequate analysis using a statistical computer program and to document these tasks to keep them reproducible.

For Beginners with No or Very Little Knowledge of the Program!

Course Topics cover:

  • “What You Type is What You Get”: Basic stata Command syntax
  • Getting (and Understanding) Help within stata: stata Bulit-in Help System
  • Basic Data Management: Load and Save stata Datasets, Generate and Manipulate Variables, Describe and Label Data and Variables, Perform Basic uni- and bivariate Analyses, Change the Structure of your Data
  • Basic stata Graphics: Scatterplot, Histogram, Bar Chart
  • Working with “Do-” and “Log-” Files

You have to register for the 4th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Structural Equation Modeling with Amos

Institution: see Organisers & Acknowledgements

Program of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Volker Müller-Benedict and Katja Spanier (University of Flensburg)

Date: 06.10.2010, 09:00 a.m. – 17:30 p.m.

Room: n.s.

Max. number of participants: 20

Semester periods per week: n.s.

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS 2010

Language of instruction: English/German (depending on participants)

Contents:
Structural equation modeling (SEM) is a statistical methodology that takes a confirmatory approach to the analysis of a strucutral theory bearing on some phenomenon. Typically, the structural relations can be modeled pictorially to enable a clearer conceptualization of the theory under study. The course introduces into the basic concepts of SEM and into the program package AMOS, which is widely used to graph and to analyze strucutral models. Data of different social areas will be used as examples.

Preconditions:  Basic knowledge of SPSS

You have to register for the 4th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.