Workshop: "Introduction to Git for Social Scientists - Enhancing Reproducibility, Visibility, and Team Collaboration" (wird verschoben)

This workshop is organised by BAGSS.

Course Outline:

In this beginner's Git workshop, discover the essentials of version control crucial for social scientists. No prior experience is needed; we start with basics, covering principles, installing Git, and fundamental commands. Gain hands-on experience in tracking changes for enhanced reproducibility. Learn effective code communication for collaboration and set up your profile homepage for increased visibility.
Key Features:

• Beginner-friendly Git introduction
• Create a Git profile/homepage
• Optimize collaborative workflows
• Practical exercises, and comprehensive materials for efficient learning.

Tailored for beginners, this workshop provides a robust foundation in collaborative research. Ideal for Stata, R, and Python users at all levels.

Date & time: wird verschoben

Location: BAGSS, Feldkirchenstra?e 21, 96050 Bamberg, Room FG1/00.06

Instructor: Dr Diana Schacht, German Youth Institute

Dr Diana D. Schacht is a senior quantitative researcher at the German Youth Institute (DJI) Munich, specializing in early education quality, migration and integration research, and survey methodologies, including strategies to reduce or correct for survey bias. Dr Schacht has extensive experience collaborating on various surveys in large teams.

Course units: 8

Registration: Please register via this form by April 1st, 2024.

Workshop: "Tips & Tricks for Advanced Stata Users" (10.10.2024, 09.00 a.m. to 05.00 p.m. (s.t.) & 11.10.2024, 09.00 a.m to 12.00 a.m. (s.t.))

This workshop is organised by BAGSS.

Course Outline:

The workshop will give some useful insights into increasing the efficiency when working with the statistical software Stata. While participants shall be already working frequently with the application, there might be certain commands and tricks to use the software more efficiently, e.g. by using macros, loops, or defining programs. The workshop is not an introduction to Stata, but will feature “best practice” of Stata usage in order to modify existing dofiles (or create new ones) to be reproducible, maintainable and efficient. The tips and tricks will refer mainly to data preparation and management, but they can also be used or automation of data analysis.

Prerequisites:

Participants should have at least moderate experience in using Stata; i. e. they should know about data manipulation commands like “reshape” and “merge”, and be capable to use them on the fly.

Date & time: Thursday, October 10, 2024, 09.00 a.m. to 05.00 p.m. (s.t.) & Friday, October 11, 2024, 09.00 a.m to 12.00 a.m. (s.t.)

Location: BAGSS, Feldkirchenstra?e 21, 96050 Bamberg, Room FG1/00.06

Instructor: Daniel Bela, Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories

Daniel Bela works as a senior data manager and survey programmer for the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) within the LIfBi. His main tasks contain survey metadata processing and handling, automated data management and documentation.

Course units: 12

Registration: Please register via this form by August 28, 2024.

Workshop: "Interviewing Elites" (08.11.2024, 09.00 a.m. - 05.00 p.m.)

This workshop is organised by BAGSS.

Course Outline:

This intensive one-day course is designed for PhD students to master elite interviewing in the social sciences. The course will equip students with skills to plan, conduct, analyze, and evaluate elite interviews effectively. In a first introductory session we will understand the value and applications of elite interviews and how to improve the quality of interviews. This is followed by a more practical sessions where we learn how to structure questionnaires, ask questions which improve response rates and data quality, and address challenges before and during interviews.

Prerequisites:

Introductory Reading will be provided by the lecturer ahead of the session. Participants may reflect for which situations they are going to use elite interviews or evaluate their previous experience with interviews.

Date & time: Friday, 08 November 2024, 09.00 a.m. - 05.00 p.m.

Location: BAGSS, Feldkirchenstra?e 21, 96050 Bamberg, Room FG1/00.06

Instructor: Professor Dr Stefanie Bailer, University of Basel

Professor Stefanie Bailer of the University of Basel has extensively utilized elite interviews in her research on decision-making by parliamentarians and civil servants within the EU, various national legislatures (including the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands), as well as in EU and UN organizations. She is currently co-authoring an article focused on enhancing the quality of elite interviews, drawing from her experiences in the international research project POLPOP, which involved interviewing parliamentarians. This new work will expand upon the recommendations she previously outlined in her publication "Interviews and Surveys in Legislative Research" (2014) in the Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies.

Course units: 8

Registration: Please register via this form by 08 October 2024.

Workshop: "Data Visualization with R" (13.01.2025, 10.00 a.m. to 03.00 p.m. (s.t.) & 15.01.2025, 09.00 a.m. to 12.00 a.m. (s.t.))

This workshop is organised by BAGSS.

Course Outline:

The aim of the workshop is to provide an accessible introduction into the use of R for data
visualization. R’s ggplot2 package and its extensions provide a flexible framework for data visualization and they are widely used in both academia and industry.
Topics covered:

• Data visualization basics (very briefly)
• Introduction to the most common plot types (barcharts, scatterplots, line charts, etc.)
• Introduction to less common plot types (maps, sankey diagrams, dumbbell plots)
• How to visualize results of different research outputs
• Creating unique themes
• Programming with ggplot2

The workshop is practice-oriented, which means that we will have some smaller and bigger
coding challenges to exercise the ggplot muscle memory early on. If you have your own
dataset and are looking for ideas on possible ways to represent it, let me know and we can
take a collective look at it.

Prerequisites:

• You should have a working R (version 4.3.1+) and RStudio (version 2023.03.0+) installed.
• Basic familiarity with R is expected.
• Some statistical knowledge is also assumed (but not necessary).

Date & time:

• Monday, January 13, 2025, 10.00 a.m. to 03.00 p.m. (s.t.)
• Wednesday, January 15, 2025, 09.00 a.m. to 12.00 a.m. (s.t.)

Location: BAGSS, Feldkirchenstra?e 21, 96050 Bamberg, Room FG1/00.06

Instructor: Dániel Kovarek, PhD, European University Institute

Dániel Kovarek is a Research Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the Central European University. He studies political behavior at the voter and the elite level; his expertise lies in the intersection of political geography and distributive politics. Previously, Daniel has been teaching a wide variety of graduate-level courses on quantitative methods, applied statistics, experiments, programming, research design, as well as comparative politics. His research has appeared in Democratization, Research & Politics and The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, among others.

Course units: 8

Registration: Please register via this form by November 27, 2024.