Institution: see Organisers & Supporters

Programme of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Dr. Kamil Marcinkiewicz, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenbourg

Date: see Workshop Programme

Max. number of participants: 20

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English

Contents: The case study research is frequently applied in the social sciences. It is particularly popular among political scientists, especially those specialising in area studies. The ubiquity of the case study research contrasts with the scarcity of theoretical reflection on its core methodological aspects. Also, the benefits of comparative analyses are often underestimated. In this course, participants will have an opportunity to learn more about what the case study research is, what are its weakness and strengths and how should we go about the core question in designing a case study: selection of cases. The course combines lectures with practical exercises and discussion of students’ projects.

Requirement of students: Please bring your laptop computer.

Recommended literature and pre-readings:

Gerring, J. (2007). Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (pp. 17-63). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

George, A. L., & Bennett, A. (2005). Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (pp. 1-34). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rueschemeyer, D. (2003). Can One or a Few Cases Yield Theoretical Gains? In J. Mahoney and D. Rueschemeyer (Eds.), Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (pp. 305-337) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hall, P.A. (2008). Systematic Process Analysis: When and How to Use it. European Political Science, 7(3), 304-317.

You have to register for the International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Institution: see Organisers & Supporters

Programme of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Assoc. Prof. Martin Meissner (University of Southern Denmark/Department of Environmental and Business Economics)

Date: see Workshop Programme

Max. number of participants: 20

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English

Contents: The participants of this course develop a sound understanding of the benefits of using conjoint analytic approaches as well as alternative advanced compositional preferences’ measurement approaches. Participants gain practical experience of using conjoint-analytic methods, and developed a better understanding of the value of measuring preferences.

The course starts with introducing the basic concepts behind the measurement of stated preferences, specifically focusing on conjoint analysis. The most often used approaches, i.e. traditional conjoint analysis, adaptive conjoint analysis and choice-based conjoint analysis are introduced. We deliberate on advantages and disadvantages of the approaches and also discuss advanced compositional approaches, like pairwise-comparison based preference measurement and the adaptive self-explicated approach. During the workshop we will further talk about all the important stages of designing a preference measurement study. We pay special attention to the types of research questions that conjoint analysis can answer. We also discuss the most important questions you should answer before setting up your preference measurement/conjoint study: What is the optimal choice of attributes and attribute level? What is a good experimental design? How should I design my survey design and present potential choice scenarios? How do I analyse the results?

Participants will have the opportunity to use Sawtooth Software on their own laptops and build their own conjoint analysis survey during the course. Based on this experience, participants will be able to improve the planning of their own future experiments.

Pre-readings:

Scholz, Sören W., Martin Meissner, and Reinhold Decker (2010), “Measuring Consumer Preferences for Complex Products: A Compositional Approach Based on Paired Comparisons,” Journal of Marketing Research, 47 (4), 685-698.

Steiner, Michael and Martin Meißner (2018), “A User’s Guide to the Galaxy of Conjoint Analysis and Compositional Preference Measurement,” Marketing ZFP, 40(2), 3-25.

Other recommended articles:

Bradlow, Eric T. (2005), “Current Issues and a ‘Wish List’ for Conjoint Analysis,” Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry, 21 (4-5), 319-323.

Hauser, John R. and Vithala Rao (2003), “Conjoint Analysis, Related Modeling, and Applications,” in Advances in Marketing Research: Progress and Prospects, in Marketing Research and Modeling: Progress and Prospects, Wind, Jerry and Paul Green (eds.), New York: Springer, 141-168.

Huber, Joel (1997), “What We Have Learned from 20 Years of Conjoint Research: When to Use Self-Explicated, Graded Pairs, Full Profiles or Choice Experiments,” Sawtooth Software Conference Proceedings, Sequim, WA., 243-256.

Netzer, Oded and Venkatachary Srinivasan (2011), “Adaptive Self-Explication of Multiattribute Preferences,” Journal of Marketing Research, 48(1), 140-156.

You have to register for the International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Institution: see Organisers & Supporters

Programme of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Dr. David Richter, German Institute for Economic Research/DIW Berlin

Date: Thursday, 13/09/18 (09.00–18.00 h)

Max. number of participants: 20

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English

Contents:

The course aims to provide an overview of the theoretical basics and empirical evidence related to questionnaire design. The cognitive process of survey responding, challenges of designing effective survey questions including aspects of proper question wording and optimal response formats, as well as pretest techniques for evaluating survey questions will be discussed.

Requirement of students: None.

Recommended literature and pre-readings: None.

You have to register for the 12th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Institution: see Organisers & Supporters

Programme of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Stefan Seth, Research Data Centre (FDZ) of the Federal Employment Agency (BA) at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB)

Date: Thursday, 13/09/18 (09.00–18.00 h)

Max. number of participants: 20

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English

Contents:

SAS is a statistical program package widely used in banks, insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical industry, so everyone who wants to become rich is at the right place in this course. SAS is very expensive if used commercially, however, for academic research, it’s free! As SAS is very fast and does not require the data to be loaded into memory (unlike R or Stata), it is particularly well suited to handle huge amounts of data.

The main focus of the course will be data preparation because this is the comparative advantage of SAS (and of the instructor). Therefore we will address the SAS data step in depth. Participants will learn about some SAS procedures for descriptive analyses, and we will get down to the nitty-gritty of reading and writing raw (non-SAS) data sets. Advanced topics like the SAS macro language or hashes will be covered if there is enough time (so most probably not at all).

Requirement of students: Participants should have installed SAS University Edition on their laptops.

Recommended literature and pre-readings: None.

You have to register for the 12th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Institution: see Organisers & Supporters

Programme of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Daniel Schnitzlein Leibnitz University Hannover & German Institute for Economic Research/DIW Berlin

Date: Thursday, 13/09/18 (09.00–18.00 h)

Max. number of participants: 20

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English

Contents:

Results of scientific research are often (and increasingly) complex and hard to understand for a non-scientific audience. However, at the same time, the transfer of results from academic research to an outside-academia recipient, for example, politics, private foundations or private firms providing research funding, but also the interested public, gets more and more important.
In this course, participants will learn how to identify, extract, and reduce relevant results from their research and how to prepare them for presentation either in form of a talk or a (policy) report.

Special emphasis is put on how to create easy to understand visualizations of quantitative results that support the transfer of knowledge.

Requirement of students: Basic knowledge on empirical (quantitative) social and economic research is beneficial. Visualization examples are based on Stata and/or R. Code examples will be provided within the lecture.

Recommended literature and pre-readings: None.

You have to register for the 12th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Institution: see Organisers & Supporters

Programme of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Rolf Brühl, ESCP Europe Business School, Berlin

Date: Thursday, 13/09/18 (09.00–18.00 h)

Max. number of participants: 20

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English

Contents:

This module intends to increase participants’ awareness of key ontological and methodological issues in social science research and, thus, explores several philosophical issues concerning the nature of social scientific theory. Topics to be covered will include some of the following: paradigms in the social sciences, truth and validity, social ontology and the nature of ‘social facts’, reductionism and methodological individualism, the explanation and interpretation of action, the role of values in social science. Completing this one-day module, participants should have first knowledge of theories and concepts enabling systematic reflection on social science.

Requirement of students: None.

Recommended literature and pre-readings:

• Rosenberg, A. (2014). Philosophy of social science. Boulder, CO: Westview.
• Schurz, G. (2014). Philosophy of science: a unified approach. New York: Routledge.
• Brühl R. (2017). Wie Wissenschaft Wissen schafft:Wissenschaftstheorie und –ethik für die Sozial- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften (2nd Ed). Konstanz: UKV/Lucius & Lucius.

You have to register for the 12th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Institution: see Organisers & Supporters

Programme of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Dr. Jonathan Mole, Europa-Universität Flensburg

Date: Thursday, 13/09/18 (09.00–18.00 h)

Max. number of participants: 20

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English

Contents:

Writing an academic text is a complex task. It requires knowledge of a range of accepted writing conventions, as well as the ability to construct sentences which are not only idiomatically and grammatically correct but also suitably connected to one another. An awareness of the requirements and a degree of practice are necessary.
This workshop is primarily for people who are in the process of writing an academic text in English – a proposal, abstract, article, thesis etc. It provides the opportunity to obtain individual feedback on a text which you submit prior to the workshop. In the workshop, assistance will be given to enable you to self-correct any issues which have been highlighted (structure, understanding, logic, language etc.). In addition, an overview of the important characteristics of academic English writing will be discussed. If required, exercises will be available to highlight topics such as academic style (formality, impersonal and objective language, passive voice, caution, nominalisation); structure a sentence, paragraph and document level; reporting verbs and their forms; coherence and cohesion; and citation and reference styles.

Requirement of students: Please supply a maximum of 2 pages of text at least two weeks before the workshop begins. English language skills at CEFR level B2/C1 are required.

Recommended literature and pre-reading: None.

You have to register for the 12th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.

Institution: see Organisers & Supporters

Programme of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Dr. Jonathan Mole, Europa-Universität Flensburg

Date: Monday, 10/09/18 – Wednesday, 12/09/18 (14.30–18.00 h)

Max. number of participants: 20

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English

Contents:

Writing an academic text can be a daunting and complex task requiring the knowledge of a range of accepted writing conventions as well as the ability to construct sentences that are idiomatically and grammatically correct. This workshop will take as the starting point the proposals you wrote for your PhD project applications. Individual feedback will be provided on the texts and assistance will be given during the workshop to enable you to self-correct any issues which have been highlighted (structure, understanding, logic, language etc.). Common issues can be discussed and experience shared. Exercise material will be available to show the importance of an awareness of a range of topics including academic style (formality, impersonal and objective language, passive voice, caution, nominalisation); structure at sentence, paragraph and document level; reporting verbs and their forms; coherence and cohesion; and citation and reference styles. Potentially useful links and book recommendations will be provided.

Requirement of students: Please supply your project proposal at least two weeks before the workshop begins.

Recommended literature and pre-reading: None.

You have to register for the 12th International Research Workshop to participate in this course.