Going to Rhine to Study Methodology of Social Survey
Ekaterina Lytkina and Natalia Soboleva shared their impressions of the first GESIS Summer School
The First GESIS Summer School in Survey methodology took place in Cologne, Germany from August 8 till August 24. Deputy Director of the LCSR Tatiana Karabchuk and research assistants Ekaterina Lytkina and Natalia Soboleva tell about their participation in the Summer School.
Ekaterina Lytkina: GESIS-Leibnitz Institute for the Social Sciences is the largest infrastructure institution for the Social Sciences in Germany with its main office in Mannheim. GESIS regularly organizes scientific workshops. The fact that summer school was held by the institute for the first time certainly gave some advantages. Some instructors were German university professors; some were field researchers, who had never taught at summer schools before. The level of classes varied a lot. Introductory courses turned out to be even more informative and tough in their schedule than main courses. On the contrary evening lectures devoted to such topics as “European Social Survey” or “Sampling” appeared to be very basic.
I attended two courses, “Structural Equation Models with Mplus” and “Cross-National Comparative Surveys”. These courses helped me to deepen knowledge in methodology of research (from verification of theoretical models (SEM) with structural equation modeling to multilevel analysis) as well as to study the most relevant statistical packages for social research.
Both courses were chosen in order to acquire systematic knowledge in the field of methodology of cross-national research. The course “Structural Equation Models with Mplus” was taught by one of the leading specialists in SEM in Germany Prof. Jost Reinecke together with Georg Kessler. Two days schedule provided student with an opportunity to get a great amount of information on methodology as well as some experience of working in the statistical package MPLUS, which can be sufficient to get oriented in methodology and can help to acquire other necessary skills.
The second course, “Cross-National Comparative Surveys” enclosed a review of main techniques of comparative surveys as well as information on the peculiarities and difficulties one should be able to deal with. Also the statistical software “R” was taught. The software is very popular among sociologists because it is delivered free of charge and is applicable for a wide range of tasks. Nevertheless the program is quite complicated to use and it’s rather difficult to examine it without background information. Literature on the use of R is appearing, though it’s incapable to cover all the recent changes concerned with the packages of R.
The school also offered an opportunity to get useful contacts. I met participants of the school form Cologne and Mannheim whose topics were related to my research project and I hope cooperation in the future would be possible. Though the schedule of the summer school was pretty tough, I had a possibility to work at the university library which turned out to be rich of literature on survey methodology as well as on my own research topic.
Natalia Soboleva: The GESIS Summer School was my first experience of participation in a summer school abroad. I chose the following courses: “Bayesian Inference using R”, “Measurement Models, Error and Equivalence” and “Item Nonresponse and Multiple Imputation”. The purpose of the first course was to prepare the students to the course on multiple imputations.
Every day we had two sessions: lectures in the morning (9.00-12.00) and seminars after the lunch break (approximately 13.30-16.30). During the first week of the course “Measurement Models, Error and Equivalence” we worked in MPLUS. I had already learned to use MPLUS during the LCSR Summer School. Still it was of interest because during the GESIS Summer school we focused on different aspects of MPLUS. The course covered specific features of means of measurements, some points on questions construction, difficulties of translating questions to other languages and cross-cultural comparisons. The course helped me to specify the development of my project “Gender attitudes in the world of work: cross-cultural comparison”.
The second main course «Item Nonresponse and Multiple Imputation» was devoted to handling missing data problem. While applying complex methods (for instance, regression) researcher quite often faces the problem of exclusion of a great deal of cases from analysis because many of them have at least one missing item. This exclusion results not only in decreased sample size but also in poor data quality. During the course we studied the means of dealing with missing data. Most of the tasks were fulfilled in R but we also used SPSS a bit.
During the Summer School I managed to make contacts which could be useful in future. The majority of participants were from Germany. Many people came from near countries like Belgium and the Netherlands. Russia was also quite well represented in the GESIS School.
I would like to thank the organizers not only for the Summer school itself but also for the organization of our stay in general. They organized evening meetings in some restaurants quite often and invited us to other events in Cologne. During one of the weekends we had a marvelous day trip down the Rhine. Despite it was very hot (37 degrees!) we enjoyed the boat trip a lot.
Cologne is a very interesting, friendly and informal city. You can always find where to go both at daytime and in the evening. The Koln Dom is unforgettable and the view from it is really fascinating! Also there are a lot of museums in Cologne. Unfortunately we had no time to visit most of them. There is a beautiful Rhine quay. Cologne is located very conveniently. It takes you a hour or two to travel from there to many other German cities and to the neighboring countries.
by Ekaterina Lytkina and Natalia Soboleva