‘Stay at Home in Summer – Stay without a Research in Winter’
This summer, research interns from the Centre for Institutional Studies participated in the 4thGESIS Summer School in Survey Methodology in Cologne and share their impressions about it below.
The GESIS Summer School in Survey Methodology has been held in Cologne since 2012 and has become well-known beyond German borders. During the three weeks, the school runs 18 courses covering various aspects of methods of quantitative, qualitative and combined research, from the choice of strategy and data collection, to the analysis of the results. GESIS School works hard to keep up with the times and offers courses not only in ‘classical’ methods of data collection and analysis, but in cutting-edge areas, such as online surveys and the use of the R package. In addition to this, each week the school attracts distinguished international experts in data collection and analysis, who read a lecture for participants.
Olga Gorelova attended a course entitled ‘Testing Survey Data for Measurement Equivalence across Countries and Time’. The lecturers were Peter Schmidt (Justus Liebig University Giessen) and Jan Cieciuch (Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw), renowned specialists in the use of structural equations for cross-cultural comparisons. As part of the course, the students not only got theoretical and empirical knowledge about multilevel structural models, but applied this newly mastered method on the data in their research and presented the results. The main advantage of the course was the opportunity to discuss students’ own research projects with the lecturers and get some valuable feedback.
Saida Ziganurova studied a course on ‘Sampling, Weighting and Estimation’. Despite the fact that the topic of how to build a sample for research is not new, this course was being held for the first time. The course was intensive: each of the five days included four hours of lectures with detailed descriptions of how to build a sample and how to calculate key statistics for each type of sample. The course also included workshops on the use of packages in R software environment. In these workshops, the students had the opportunity to put their new knowledge into practice.
The university’s friendly atmosphere helped the HSE research interns meet international students and scholars from Spain, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Greece, Kazakhstan, Korea, and many others. The School is a unique platform for exchanging experience and ideas on how to improve research projects. A unique feature of the school is the less formal atmosphere of the discussions, where school participants of all levels and expertise, from students to renowned scholars, can freely discuss various projects and share insights into research methods.
To learn more about the school visit its website.