GESIS Training News - Special Edition

The 2nd Virtual GESIS Spring Seminar offers high quality training in state-of-the-art techniques in quantitative data analysis taught by leading experts in the field. In 2022, all courses will deal with simulation techniques in the social sciences and beyond. It targets advanced graduate or PhD students, post-docs, junior and senior researchers. Lectures in each course are complemented by extensive hands-on exercises and tutorials with applications to both simulated and real-world data. All courses are held in English. The Spring Seminar 2022 will take place 07 - 25 March 2022.

Week 1 (07 - 11 March):

Agent-based Modeling in the Social Sciences

Prof. Dr. Andreas Flache; Carlos de Matos Fernandes; Tanzhe Tang   

Week 2 (14 - 18 March):

Policy Modeling

Prof. Dr. Petra Ahrweiler; Dr. Corinna Elsenbroich    

Week 3 (21 - 25 March):

Using Simulation Studies to Evaluate Statistical Methods

Dr. Tim P. Morris; Dr. Matteo Quartagno   

Courses will be held online (via Zoom) and must be booked separately – whether you wish to attend one, two, or all of them. There is no registration deadline, but places are limited and allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. Thanks to our cooperation with the Cologne Graduate School in Management, Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne, enrolled doctoral students can obtain three ECTS credit points per one-week course. For registration and detailed course descriptions, please visit our website!

Andreas is professor of sociology at the Department of Sociology, at the Faculty for Social and Behavioral Sciences of the University of Groningen, and the ICS (Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology). In his research, he focuses on social integration, cooperation problems, social networks, and learning theory. For this, he applies agent-based computational and game theoretical modeling, laboratory experiments, network research, survey research and various other methods. He will teach the course on “Agent-based Modeling” with Carlos de Matos Fernandes and Tanzhe Tang at the GESIS Spring Seminar 2022.

How did you become interested in your subject?

Already during my studies of Computer Science I encountered fascinating examples of how the emergence of complex and surprising dynamics of (social) systems can be understood by computer simulation. That motivated me to move into the social sciences to study important and pressing societal issues from this perspective.

What lessons can participants draw from your GESIS course?

How to use computer simulation models to better understand complex and surprising links between individual actions and societal outcomes. How to create and use models of important social phenomena themselves. And most of all, how to develop a better understanding of complex dynamics by systematic analysis of such models.

What do you enjoy most about being a social scientist?

I enjoy connecting theories and empirical research on pressing societal issues like segregation, polarization, or lack of cooperation with insights from computer modeling. The most gratifying thing is if this helps to create new theoretical ideas or provide new explanations of puzzling social phenomena which ultimately are empirically and practically useful.

What do you think is the most exciting recent development in your field?

I think the emergence of Computational Social Science as a toolkit to study large-scale digital trace data is an exciting development. Even more exciting is the challenge of using the power of theoretical agent-based modelling for unravelling theoretical mechanisms behind empirical patterns identified by CSS. This challenge hasn't yet been met sufficiently by the CSS / ABM research communities, in my view. It is time we start addressing it.

We thank Andreas for his interesting insights and look forward to his class.