GESIS Training News

As we near the end of the year, we wanted to take a moment to thank you very much for your continuous support, suggestions, and feedback.

We are looking forward to continuing to offer a future-oriented training portfolio for you and wish you all the best for 2023. We hope to see you next year, online and in Cologne or Mannheim at one of our events.

May you and your loved ones have a relaxing holiday season and a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year.

Your GESIS Training team

The Spring Seminar offers high-quality training in state-of-the-art techniques in quantitative data analysis taught by leading experts in the field. It is designed for advanced graduate or PhD students, post-docs, as well as junior and senior researchers. In 2023, all courses will deal with techniques and methods for "Modeling Group Differences" in the social sciences and beyond. Extensive hands-on exercises and tutorials complement lectures in each course. All courses are held in English. The Spring Seminar takes place on-site in Cologne, Germany, from 27 February to 17 March 2023. Only if the pandemic hits again heavily will we move the courses online.

Week 1 (27 Feb-03 Mar)

Comparative Social Research with Multi-Group SEM

Daniel Seddig, Eldad Davidov, Peter Schmidt, Yannick Diehl   

Week 2 (06-10 Mar)

Decomposition Methods in the Social Sciences

Johannes Giesecke, Ben Jann   

Week 3 (13-17 Mar)

Latent Class Analysis

Daniel Oberski   

There is no registration deadline, but places are limited and allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. Our cooperation with the Cologne Graduate School in Management, Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne allows enrolled doctoral students to obtain three ECTS credit points per one-week course.

For registration and detailed course descriptions, please visit our website!

We will kick off the program for 2023 in February with workshops on digital behaviorial data (Youtube, Twitter and sensor data), qualitative data collection and analysis (qualitative interviews, grounded theory methodology and Expert*inneninterviews), and workshops on multiverse analysis and introduction to R. Moreover, we are ready for workshops on DAGs, and programming web surveys in March.

And on top, we have our free-of-charge workshop on visualizing categorical data with hammock plots.

The months leading up to summer are further peppered with courses that might be relevant for you. You can find the entire list of confirmed workshops for the first half of 2023 below.

We update our website regularly, so stay tuned!

We would like to provide you with even more tailored offers in the area of data quality measurement in the future. We are therefore kindly asking you to participate in our approximately seven-minute survey on data usage and training potential by Tuesday, January 10. Attention the questionnaire is in German only.

Please click this link.

The 2nd International Summer School in Uganda (ISSU-2) on Survey Methodology and Data Management took place in Masaka from 03 to 14 October 2022. The ISSU-2 was funded by the VW Foundation and jointly organized by GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany, and Muteesa I Royal University, Uganda. It was coordinated by Norman Mukasa, Aisha Jjagwe, and Vincent Ssekitoleko of Muteesa I Royal University, and GESIS staff members Loretta Langendörfer and Marlene Mauk. Funded under the “Knowledge for Tomorrow” scheme, the summer school aims at capacity building and exchange for survey methodology and data management in East Africa. It also wants to develop local competences for data generation and effective data management for the social sciences and related disciplines such as education and health in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. [Continue reading]

For more information on the project, visit www.gesis.org/issu.

Reinhard is professor of Sociology at the University of Wuppertal, School of Human and Social Sciences. He works primarily in the field of social stratification and inequality, with a focus on migration and family-related processes. In addition to that, he has a focus on quantitative methods. His current research project focuses on educational systems and ethnic educational inequalities. Nora is a doctoral student and works at the University of Wuppertal. Her research interests comprise intergroup relations, educational inequality, and quantitative methods. In February, they will teach the course “Applied Multiverse Analysis” in the GESIS Workshop program.

How did you become interested in your subject?

Nora: I was concerned with the question of how robust the results we produce are. So many decisions go into the research process, and the results can depend on those decisions.

Reinhard: Some decisions in research have a clear theoretical foundation. Others may not and, in a sense, are somewhat arbitrary. These decisions could have been different. This can concern, for instance, the operationalization of concepts or the choice of the statistical model. Furthermore, these decisions are often intransparent. Not because researchers want to hide something but mostly because they lack the tools to do it otherwise. Multiverse analyses are a way to make these decisions and the effects transparent.

Nora: Conducting a multiverse analysis also gives me more confidence in the results.

What lessons can participants draw from your GESIS course?

Nora & Reinhard: The participants will learn how to conduct a multiverse analysis and how to present and interpret the results. They will learn how to apply a multiverse analysis to their research, what challenges may arise in the process, and how to deal with them. The limitations of multiverse analysis will also be discussed.

What do you enjoy most about being a social scientist?

Nora: Working as a scientist is a learning process. I really enjoy this. I constantly learn new things in conducting my research. Nevertheless, that's of course not limited to social scientists.

Reinhard: I also really enjoy the learning process. Multiverse analysis is a case in point. I think this is an exciting development in the social sciences. Like other related developments, for instance, the open science movement, it can create better scientific practices and, hopefully, lead to better research.

We thank Nora & Reinhard for their interesting insights and look forward to their workshop.