Microcredential komex: Survey Experiments

This course offers an introduction to vignette and conjoint survey experiments, enabling students to conduct their own survey experimental research including design, implementation and analysis.

What Is This Course About?
Survey experiments have become central in the social science methods toolbox, promising the dual benefit of an experimental design (for causal inference) on population-representative samples (for externally validity). This course introduces students to conjoint and vignette survey experiments, introducing the basic logic, summarizing current topical debates on promises and pitfalls, and giving hands-on advice on design, implementation, and analysis in applied work. We expect and encourage students to bring their own conceptual idea for a survey-experimental research question that they want to develop further during the course.

Learning Goals

• Students understand the basics of conjoint and vignette survey
  experimental design, implementation and analysis.
• Design: Students are able to set-up and evaluate a conjoint/vignette survey-experimental research project, including ethical implications, preregistration, and power analysis.
• Implementation: Students learn on the dos and don'ts of conjoint/vignette survey-experimental implementation in applied practice.
• Analysis: Students are able to analyze, visualize and interpret conjoint/vignette survey-experimental data.

Assignments for the Course

• Attendance: participant has demonstrably attended 80% of all course activities.
• Formative assignments: Exercises regarding design, implementation and analysis (not graded and typically delivered during the course).
• Final written assignment: Bigger take-home assignment on either design (e.g., reporting in a pre-registration format) or analysis stage (e.g., reporting on own or replication survey experimental data) that will receive feedback. No grades are provided other than pass or fail.

Schedule

•         09:00-10:30h: Course
•         10:30-11:00h: Break
•         11:00-12:30h: Course
•         12:30-13:30h: Lunch break
•         13:30-14:30h: Course

Recommended Readings for the Course

• Mutz, D. C. (2011). Population-based survey experiments. Princeton University Press. Chap. 4, 6, 7.
• Bansak, K., Hainmueller, J., Hopkins, D., & Yamamoto, T. (2021). Conjoint Survey Experiments. In J. Druckman & D. Green (Eds.), Advances in Experimental Political Science (pp. 19-41). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hainmueller, J., & Hopkins, D. J. (2015). The hidden American immigration consensus: A conjoint analysis of attitudes toward immigrants. American journal of political science, 59(3), 529-548.

Who Is Your Instructor?
Franziska Quoß: Franziska Quoß is a PostDoc in the National Studies Team of GESIS. In her work as survey data expert, she focuses on the design and implementation of the ALLBUS, with a focus on combining surveys with geospatial data. She conducted her doctorate at ETH Zurich where she was a project coordinator of the Swiss Environmental Panel. Beyond survey methods, her research interests are in the field of environmental politics.

Lukas Rudolph: Lukas Rudolph is Assistant Professor for Political Behavior at the Center for Data and Methods at the Department of Politics and Public Administration of University of Konstanz. He has a strong interest in questions of political methodology, especially design-based inference with observational data and general population survey experiments, with substantial experience in gathering survey data and running conjoint and vignette survey experiments (e.g. within the Swiss Environmental Panel). Substantively, he has a specific interest in environmental politics, preference formation, voting behavior and electoral institutions.