Duration of the Workshop:
2.5 hours
Target Groups:
The workshop is aimed at anyone working in the survey industry, researchers and anyone who is interested.
Is the workshop geared at an exclusively German or an international audience?
International audience (material will be in English)
Workshop Language:
English. While the instruction material is in English, we can handle questions in German, too.
Description of the content of the workshop:
Survey data is contaminated with nonsubstantial variations from countless sources such as response styles, socially desirable responses and (partially) falsified interviews. We discover several of these causes, some originating in the design of the questionnaire (before the field phase) and others due to the individual behaviour of participants (during the field phase). The magical number seven matches both important sources of contamination due to effects in the questionnaire and important sources of contamination caused by respondents during participation in surveys. The aim is therefore to find variations in the observed responses that are not related to actual differences in participants' opinions.
In the workshop, we will look together at various possible contaminations, analyse data using concrete examples, discuss how such data can be prevented or cleaned up and what recommendations can be derived for future survey conducting. The workshop will include theoretical and practical inputs, as well as numerous activities with concrete data. Questions and discussions as well as examples from your own experience and data practice are welcome.
Phenomena include speeders, outliers, acquiescence, extreme response styles, mid-point responding and stereotypical responses, patterns, misunderstanding of questions due to poor item construction, and falsified and partially falsified interviews by interviewers and staff of survey research organisations, different fieldwork standards, different question formats for the same topic across several surveys, different content-related or methodological contexts, e.g. in cross-national surveys or multi-year surveys, heterogeneous interpretation of the questions due to cultural differences.
Necessary prior knowledge of participants:
Prior experience in surveys and survey research principles is beneficial but not required. We do not assume specific knowledge on the topic of data quality.
Literature that participants need to read for preparation
None
Recommended additional literature
List is handed out in the workshop.
Information about the instructors:
Raffael is co-founder and CTO of onlineumfragen.com and works as a researcher for the professorship "Media and Computer Science Didactics" at the Institut für Medien und Schule (IMS) at University of Teacher Education Schwyz. With onlineumfragen.com, as a specialised online survey partner and survey consultant for the DACH region, he supports selected clients and manages the development of the survey platform. With an interdisciplinary background in psychology, educational science, computer science and methodology, he works entrepreneurially and scientifically on data quality in online surveys and privacy & data protection behaviour in children. He held several workshops on the topic of data quality in online surveys at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and for the Swiss market research association Swiss Insights.
Will participants need to bring their own devices in order to be able to access the Internet? Will they need to bring anything else to the workshop?
All material is provided (data sets). As the workshop is conducted online, internet access is required. A PC/laptop with excel is required to practise activations and exercises. Individual examples of identification methods are shown in R, but R is generally not required by the participants.
