GESIS online talks on Social Science Methods and Research Data
With our series we offer brief insights into current social science methodological research and the design and analysis potential of GESIS research data.
Set up & registration: Each session consists of a talk and a moderated Q&A part. All talks will take place online as Zoom meetings on Thursdays, 1 pm-2 pm (CET/CEST). Please register for the session(s) you are interested in below (click on blue bars beyond to expand). Your registration will be confirmed by email.
Data protection: Your contact information will be deleted at GESIS after the talks you registered for have been completed. More information on data protection at GESIS can be found here.
Slides and a recording of the talk will be made publicly available after each session. Please check the descriptions of past talks for respective links (click on blue bars to expand). For the recordings you might also go directly to the “meet the experts” playlists on the GESIS YouTube channel. (Side note: only the talk will be recorded, not the Q&A.)
Contact, questions & feedback: You can reach the meet the experts team via email.
If you wish to keep up with events and other GESIS activities, please subscribe to the monthly bilingual GESIS newsletter.
Season 8: Questionnaire design – GESIS offerings to researchers in terms of services and tools
Are you currently developing a questionnaire for a study, will you soon develop a questionnaire or do you simply want to know more about questionnaire design or how similar questions can be harmonized across studies? Then this season of Meet the Experts will be for you. We will present QuestionLink, a tool for harmonizing instruments across large-scale social science surveys in Germany; SQP – the Survey Quality Predictor, an open access system for predicting quality of continuous questions in survey research; the ZIS portal, which offers open access validated and documented measurement instruments for the social sciences, and which is looking forward for your instruments as well; and the GESIS pretest database providing detailed pretesting reports on a variety of items and topics, mainly for the German language. The various presenters will show you at what stage in the research process you can make use of these services and tools to improve and enrich your questionnaire development or analysis process.
17.04.2025 (THU), 13:00-14:00 (CET): Automating Survey Data Harmonization: The QuestionLink R-Package
Slides (1.92 MB) | Presentation on YouTube | MTE Playlist
The Lecture will be held in English.
Survey programs often choose different wordings or response scales to capture the same concepts. Furthermore, wordings or response scales can also change during a long running time series within a survey program. This can pose a challenge if we want to compare or combine survey data across different survey programs or across time. A central challenge is that such question differences lead to different measurement units, meaning that the numerical values in the different datasets imply different levels of the same concept. The QuestionLink R-Package was designed to help researchers with this challenge. QuestionLink uses a psychometric approach called observed score equating in a random groups design (OSE-RG) to increase the comparability across different question wordings and response scales. The main advantage of QuestionLink is that it finds opportunities for harmonization in large, combined datasets from different survey programs automatically. However, in its current form, QuestionLink harmonizes data within countries, but not across countries.
In this talk, I will (1) briefly explain the harmonization challenge, (2) explain how QuestionLink resolves this challenge, and (3) give some practical guidance on how to tell if QuestionLink is the right fit for your project.
Presenter:
08.05.2025 (THU), 13:00-14:00 (CET): Development and Assessment of survey items with the Survey Quality Predictor
Slides (5.81 MB) | Presentation on YouTube | MTE Playlist
The Lecture will be held in English.
Designing questionnaires is considered an art that requires knowledge and experience. To improve the scientific nature of this process, researchers can use the freely accessible web-based tool, the Survey Quality Predictor (SQP) 3.0. Similar to weather forecasting, SQP estimates the measurement quality of survey questions based on their formal-linguistic characteristics. When comparing different question versions, their quality estimates provide valuable guidance in selecting the better option. Additionally, they can be used to correct for measurment error in substantial analyses.
As a supplement to conventional methods such as cognitive pretesting and expert reviews, SQP can also be used to refine questions and support international survey projects by identifying discrepancies between an original suvery question and its translations.
In this talk, I will (1) briefly provide an overview of key decisions involved in survey question design, (2) explain how the quality of a survey question can be estimated, and (3) offer some practical guidance on using SQP to predict the quality of a survey question. This tool is particularly valuable for anyone designing their own survey questions, working on international survey projects, and seeking to correct for measurement error in their analyses.
Presenter:
12.06.2025 (THU), 13:00-14:00 (CET): ZIS – The Open Access Repository for Measurement Instruments: Discovering, Creating, and Sharing Research Instruments
Slides | Presentation on YouTube | MTE Playlist
The Lecture will be held in English.
ZIS is an open access repository that provides validated measurement instruments. As such it fosters transparent and reproducible research. In this talk, we will explore how ZIS empowers researchers to discover, create, and share essential instruments for data collection. We’ll navigate the platform’s search and filtering features, e.g. for finding suitable scales, then outline the process for publishing new or adapted instruments. By showcasing best practices, we will demonstrate how using ZIS can streamline research workflows, promote quality assurance, and advance open science principles.
Presenter:
10.07.2025 (THU), 13:00-14:00 (CET): Die GESIS Pretest-Datenbank - Pretestergebnisse und Empfehlungen zu über 3.000 getesteten Survey-Items
Slides | Presentation on YouTube | MTE Playlist
The Lecture will be held in German.
Kognitive Pretests prüfen, ob Fragen bzw. Items verständlich sind und wie intendiert von den Befragten interpretiert werden. Die GESIS Pretest-Datenbank ist ein Open Access Repositorium von Survey-Fragen, die mittels kognitiver Pretests bei GESIS evaluiert wurden. Sie richtet sich an Personen, die kognitiv getestete Fragen recherchieren, entweder im Rahmen der Fragebogenkonstruktion, um diese für eigene Erhebungen zu nutzen, oder um Informationen darüber zu erhalten, wie Fragen, die in Umfragen eingesetzt wurden, von den Befragten verstanden und beantwortet werden. Die Datenbank enthält aktuell mehr als 3.000 kognitiv getestete Fragen bzw. Items aus vielfältigen Themenbereichen (z.B. Arbeit & Beruf, Gesellschaft & Soziales, Gesundheit, Politik). Für die Fragen sind die detaillierten Ergebnisse der Pretests dokumentiert, sowie etwaige Vorschläge zur Optimierung der Fragen. Der Vortrag beginnt mit einer kurzen Einführung zum Hintergrund kognitiver Pretests und stellt im Anschluss die Inhalte der Pretest-Datenbank, ihre Funktionen und ihre Recherchemöglichkeiten anhand verschiedener Beispiele vor.
Vortragender:
Archive
Missed an episode? No problem! In our archive you can listen to all episodes of our expert series. In the event information you will find the link to the recordings on Youtube. Additionally, you have the possibility to download the PowerPoint slides.
- Season 1 - Survey Methodology
- Season 2 - Computational Social Science and Digital Behavioral Data
- Season 3 - Data and Research on Society
- Season 4: Augmenting survey data by linking and harmonisation
- Season 5: Data Services, Data Archiving, and Research Data Management
- Season 6: Knowledge technologies for the Social Science: Access to Social Science Data and Services
- Season 7: New data sets and data potentials in the Social Sciences
