Workshops

This workshop is designed for researchers who are planning to collect original data and considering how to select one or more methods for doing so.

The workshop begins with a review of effective and clear research question formulation and proceeds to a discussion of the advantages and opportunities, as well as limitations of various data collection methods (and associated analytic techniques), including survey research, in-depth interviewing, focus groups, and text analysis.

In addition, the workshop will attend to logistical and theoretical considerations in implementing each of these research approaches.

This workshop covers the process of writing and testing survey questions in depth. There is no way to be certain that respondents will interpret your questions exactly as you intend and provide the answers you want, but this workshop will introduce what is known about the psychology of survey response and generally accepted best practices for question writing.

Topics include how survey mode affects question writing, the potential for bias in questions, appropriate answer options, and writing survey questions for experiments. The workshop will conclude with a review of methods for testing questions to ensure their validity and reliability.

This workshop provides an introduction to conducting survey experiments, including a brief motivation for when and why to use an experiment. The workshop covers common experimental designs, how to design and pretest experimental manipulations, and concludes with a discussion of how to analyze experimental data.