The rise of big data indicates a “watershed moment for the social sciences”. Not only are we faced with large and multifarious types of data (e.g. texts, geo location, time stamps, entire full-text archives, pictures), often very unstructured, and stemming from all sorts of sources and phenomena, we are also challenged in our theoretical underpinnings of what constitutes the social and how we can analyze it. We are also witnessing the rise of methods that help to identify patterns and relations, and to reduce complexity. Tools and algorithms of computational linguistics, machine learning, and network analysis are challenging the traditional tool kits of social science methods that work with representative samples, independent observations, statistical significance or analysts’ privileged positions in local settings. The talk discusses some of the methodological and analytical challenges large-scale textual data pose to sociological analysis. It highlights challenges of data construction, algorithmic models of data analysis, and data interpretation using examples of empirical studies.  While indicating challenges, the talk is also certain to point out opportunities such approaches offer to sociological inquiries.

Sophie Mützel, short bio

Sophie Mützel is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology, University of Lucerne, Switzerland. She teaches on the sociology of algorithms, big data and social media, as well as on metrics in journalism and the digital economy within the study program on “media and networks”. Her research interests lie in the areas of big data and its analytics, in particular text analytics and network analysis, as well as economic and cultural sociology. She recently finished a book manuscript on “Markets from stories”. She is also the PI of the Swiss federal government funded NRP75 project “Facing big data: methods and skills for a 21st century sociology”.

Sophie studied Political Science at UC Berkeley, Sociology at Cornell University, and finished her PhD in Sociology at Columbia University. After completing her PhD, she held a Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute, Italy; afterwards she taught and conducted research at Humboldt-University Berlin and at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. She has been a research fellow at Harvard University and held a visiting professorship at the University of Vienna.

Tuesday 12:15-13:30. Follow this Methods and Research Meeting via Zoom !

 https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/99864876847

Die Chancen und die Herausforderungen der Kombination von Daten aus unterschiedlichen Quellen beschäftigen die empirischen Sozialwissenschaften zur Zeit stark. An der Tagung stellen wir Best Practices vor und diskutieren die Voraussetzungen und konkrete Anwendungsbeispiele für die Kombination unterschiedlicher Daten.

Diese Veranstaltung wird von der SAGW organisiert. Einige Referenten sind Forschende bei FORS.

Programmdetails

Die Anmeldung erfolgt via Webseite der SAGW.

Call for Contributions to a Special Issue on the 2019 Swiss National Elections

Professor Anke Tresch, Head of Group Political Surveys at FORS and co-editor of The Swiss Political Science Review invites contributions that focus on new theoretical, methodological or empirical aspects in the study of election campaigns and voting behaviour in Switzerland and in comparative perspective.

Full details of the call are available here.

The deadline for submitting proposals is: 31st August 2020

We are happy to inform that the Summer School in Social Science Methods will take place in Lugano from the 14th to the 28th of August; given the situation with COVID-19, we will provide an option of attending the workshops on-line for those who are not in position to travel. Should the situation require it, the Summer School will  switch to remote mode. Registration is open upon a first-come first-serve basis, as the number of participants per workshop is limited to guarantee optimal learning conditions.

The Summer School offers:

• 12 one-week full-time workshops including extensive practical work and interaction with the lecturer.
• A wide offer of quantitative methods, such as panel data analysis and structural equation modeling, and qualitative methods, such as case study design and qualitative interviewing.
• A well-qualified international faculty.
• A highly attractive working and living environment in Lugano.
• Participants are strongly encouraged to work on their own data and research problems to get the most out of their Summer School experience.

All workshops and other Summer School related activities will be held at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Lugano West Campus, Centrocivico, Via Giuseppe Buffi 13, CH-6900 Lugano.

Each regular workshop runs from Monday through Friday (from 8 h 30 through 18 h), an average effective teaching time of 7½ to 8 hours per day, i.e. a total of up to 35-40 hours for each workshop.

The workshop application status is based on the number of persons who have applied for a workshop, i.e. conditional applications. Only the payment of the registration fee within three weeks from reception of the invoice confirms the application and makes the registration final.

The language in all workshops and lectures will be English.

Participants are Ph.D. students, junior and senior researchers and practitioners, from Switzerland and abroad working in a wide range of scientific disciplines: Psychology, Educational, Business Studies, Communication, Political Science, Sociology, Health Sciences, and many others.

Detailed information on the Summer School can be found here !

Register here !

Professor Anke Tresch, Head of Group Political Surveys at FORS and editor of the Swiss Political Science Review published at Wiley has released a call for contributions to the special issue “COVID-19 : A Political Science Perspective”.

Welcome are short research notes. Proposals in English should be 150 words.

The deadline is 31 July 2020.

Full details of the call are available here

FORS and the GREC research group of the UNIL Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (SSP) is organizing a one-day academic conference titled:

The state of democracy in a comparative perspective

28 February 2020, 9h30-16h30

IDHEAP building room 001 AULA

 The event is co-sponsored by:
Montoring Electoral Democracy (MEDem)
Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES)

The programme contains 4 panels and 10 presentations scheduled around various engaging topics on electoral democracy.

Consult the programme !

No registration needed.

For more details: annika.lindholm@unil.ch

FORS researcher Michael Ochsner will give an overview of his research soon to be published in the series FORS Guides to survey methods and data management.

Representativeness of Surveys and its Analysis

Abstract: When fielding a survey, we want to find out some unknown characteristics of the population or how the population thinks about specific topics. However, it is not possible to ask each member of the population to give us the desired information. Hence, instead of asking the whole population, the information is asked only from a small selection of the population under scrutiny. As survey practitioners and data analysts we are concerned about the quality of our sample because if the sample is significantly different from the whole population, statements about the population can be biased. To address this issue, representation analyses are conducted. However, the term and concept of “representativeness” has been challenged in the statistical literature for decades. In this presentation, I will give an overview of the concept of representativeness and the problems involved and suggest a multidimensional approach to the problem of sample quality with regard to inference. Instead of a deterministic concept of a sample “representative for the population”, I suggest examining risks for representation bias linked to the purpose of data use.

Everyone can join the FORS Lunch Seminar in room 5899 at Geopolis on Thursday, December 19, from 12:15 to 13:15.

The organizing committee

Jacques-Antoine Gauthier

Jessica Herzing

Oliver Lipps

Caroline Roberts

Stephanie Steinmetz

Le cycle de conférence du GREC vous invite à suivre la présentation de Alice Evans (King’s College, London) intitulée:

Overcoming the global despondency trap: Strengthening corporate accountability in supply chains

Abstract:

Many activists are stuck in a despondency trap. Never seeing radical reform, they assume it is impossible, moderate their ambitions, and invest in more feasible but sub-optimal alternatives. This creates a negative feedback loop, in which the dearth of radical reform becomes self-fulfilling. But if reformists see advances at home and abroad, they may become more optimistic about collective mobilisation and break out of their despondency trap. This is shown by tracing the drivers of ground-breaking legislation. From 2018, large French firms must mitigate risks of environmental and human rights abuses in their global supply chains, or else be liable. This bill – the world’s first of its kind – was vociferously contested by businesses. But French campaigners and politicians persisted for four years, because fortuitous circumstances fueled hope for reform. Meanwhile in Switzerland, a huge civil society coalition is pushing for corporate accountability. Although the right-wing government courts a wealth of multinationals, Swiss activists knew they could change the constitution if their popular initiative gained 100’000 signatures and a subsequent majority of the people and cantons. Believing change was possible, a growing coalition invested in sustained activism. As more organisations joined, others gained confidence in the possibility of legislative change, so invested in the Responsible Business Initiative. Their advances have delivered a positive shock to activists across Europe, inspired to launch similar campaigns, and escape their despondency trap.

Géopolis Room 2879, 16h

___________________________________________

Le Groupe de Recherche sur les Élections et la Citoyenneté Politique (GREC) constitue une unité de recherche de l’IEP. Il regroupe des chercheuses et chercheurs — à l’IEP mais également au sein d’autres institutions — s’intéressant aux élections et votations, aux partis politiques, aux mouvements sociaux ou à la politique contestataire, et plus globalement aux questions de citoyenneté politique.

Les objectifs de ce centre de recherche sont multiples. Premièrement, le GREC sert de lieu d’échange intellectuel et de discussion pour les chercheurs et docto­rants de l’IEP et d’autres institutions travaillant dans les domaines des élections et des votations, des mouvements sociaux, de l’activisme et de la citoyenneté politique. A ce titre, il favorise les contacts et collaborations avec l’extérieur, notamment en invitant des conférenciers d’autres universités. Deuxièmement, le GREC entend renforcer la visibilité des recherches qui se font dans les domaines mentionnés, aussi bien à l’IEP que dans les institutions partenaires. Enfin, le GREC a pour mission de valoriser les enquêtes sous la responsabilité de FORS (en particulier Selects, Voto et le Panel Suisse de Ménages) et de renforcer les collaborations entre l’IEP et FORS.

Le cycle de conférence du GREC vous invite à suivre la présentation de Mattias Wahlström de l’Université de Gothenburg intitulée:

Climate protesters and their motives for participating: Results from an international survey of participants in Fridays for Future climate strikes.

Abstract:

The #FridaysForFuture (FFF) climate protests mobilized more than 1.6 million people around the globe on 15 March 2019. Media coverage of these protests and high-level national and international political meetings involving the movement’s icon, Greta Thunberg, illustrate a level of global attention that no previous youth movement has ever received. A team of social scientists from universities across Europe organized a survey of the March global FFF strike event in 13 cities. Results from this survey will be presented and analysed with a focus on variations in participant motives and the meanings participants assign to the protest.

Géopolis Room 2238, 16h

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Le Groupe de Recherche sur les Élections et la Citoyenneté Politique (GREC) constitue une unité de recherche de l’IEP. Il regroupe des chercheuses et chercheurs — à l’IEP mais également au sein d’autres institutions — s’intéressant aux élections et votations, aux partis politiques, aux mouvements sociaux ou à la politique contestataire, et plus globalement aux questions de citoyenneté politique.

Les objectifs de ce centre de recherche sont multiples. Premièrement, le GREC sert de lieu d’échange intellectuel et de discussion pour les chercheurs et docto­rants de l’IEP et d’autres institutions travaillant dans les domaines des élections et des votations, des mouvements sociaux, de l’activisme et de la citoyenneté politique. A ce titre, il favorise les contacts et collaborations avec l’extérieur, notamment en invitant des conférenciers d’autres universités. Deuxièmement, le GREC entend renforcer la visibilité des recherches qui se font dans les domaines mentionnés, aussi bien à l’IEP que dans les institutions partenaires. Enfin, le GREC a pour mission de valoriser les enquêtes sous la responsabilité de FORS (en particulier Selects, Voto et le Panel Suisse de Ménages) et de renforcer les collaborations entre l’IEP et FORS.

The seminar will be presented by FORS researcher Robert Reinecke. He will present a research project he is currently working on at the Institut des sciences logopédiques (Institute of Speech and Language Pathology) at the University of Neuchâtel.

Abstract:

Population aging is a contemporary world-wide phenomenon: the aged population is currently at its highest level in human history, and the rate at which the population ages will increase over the next decades. This demographical change has profound implications for the organization of modern societies, and calls for the joint contribution of several disciplines to better understand its impact and address its challenges. A major challenge concerns the domain of communication. Age-related decline in language abilities requires the deployment of appropriate communicative strategies in order to efficiently navigate interactions with elderly people. It is thus of the foremost importance to recognize the language changes that accompany aging, as well as their relationship with the decline of further cognitive abilities (e.g. memory).

In this talk, I will give an overview about the cognitive changes that occur over the lifespan and present a study that aims at investigating the processing of presuppositions in older adults. Even though lexical knowledge appears to be resistant to age-related decline, recent research points out that pragmatic abilities decline with age: older adults struggle with interpreting indirect meanings and humorous uses of language and fail to rely on important social cues for language comprehension, such as emotional prosody. These results clearly show that aging impacts the pragmatics of language, and they raise the question of how consistent is this effect. Pragmatic abilities include assessing discourse appropriateness and relevance, and enriching meaning beyond what is explicitly said. In this respect, the ability to recover a speaker’s presuppositions plays a crucial role in language understanding. In fact, presuppositions represent the background information, communicated as taken for granted, that needs to be recovered in order to establish discourse relevance and the appropriateness of interlocutors’ utterances. Consider the utterance “Paul stopped smoking”. The speaker here asserts that Paul does not smoke and presupposes that he has been smoking. The recovery of the presupposition is triggered by the change of state verb stop. In order to better understand the role of working memory capacity in understanding and recovering presuppositions across the lifespan, I present a study, in which the mental workload of the task was manipulated (low vs high).

This FORS Lunch Seminar will take place on Thursday, November 14, from 12:15 to 13:15 in room 5899 at Geopolis.

Zoé Kergomard from Deutsches Historisches Institut Paris presents a paper called “Shall the “people” speak? Elites and electoral participation in France, Germany and Switzerland since 1945.”

The GREC organizes a series of conferences on topics within the scope of its scientific activities: political activism and protest, voting behaviour, citizenship, altruism, etc. The invited speakers are in principle senior researchers working at other universities in Switzerland and abroad.

https://www.unil.ch/grec/home/menuguid/activites.html

The presentation will take place at Géopolis, University of Lausanne, Room 2235, October 16, 2019, 5 pm.

The programme of the conference series

Weakening social cohesion in Europe? Indicators, analysis and policy implications

This is the theme of the 14th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe” at Villa Vigoni, Loveno di Menaggio, Italy.

Invited are contributions looking at social cohesion as an important topic of social monitoring and reporting from either perspective, within as well as between European societies. More specifically, the conference seeks to bring together and discuss empirical evidence, allowing to better assess whether or not social cohesion within and between societies is weakening or declining.

The European Consortium of Sociological Research (ECSR) will hold its next annual conference at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland on 12-14 September 2019. The conference theme is:

https://ecsr2019.sciencesconf.org/

La septième édition du «Festival suisse des méthodes qualitatives» se déroulera les lundi 9 et mardi 10 septembre 2019 à l’Université de Lausanne (bâtiment Géopolis).

Selon une formule désormais bien rodée, le Festival se propose de présenter les innovations récentes dans le domaine des méthodes qualitatives et mixtes. A l’instar de l’édition de 2017, la manifestation se propose une fois encore de mettre l’accent sur une thématique particulière. Pour cette édition, ce sont les enjeux et les défis soulevés par l’open data qui seront mis en avant par le biais de 3 ateliers thématiques et deux séances plénières.

Le Festival offre une plateforme d’échange aux chercheuses et chercheurs des sciences sociales et humaines (et spécialement aux doctorant-e-s et post-doctorant-e-s) désirant se former à de nouvelles méthodes. Il vise également à réunir la communauté de recherche qualitative active en Suisse romande et se déroulera principalement en langue française. Plus concrètement, des spécialistes renommé-e-s seront à disposition pour discuter de l’application de méthodes et théories dans le cadre de différents ateliers de recherche. Les participant-e-s qui le désirent auront ainsi l’occasion d’aborder des questions au plus proche de leurs préoccupations.

Le lundi après-midi aura lieu la conférence de Ghislaine Chartron (CNAM):  « L’ouverture des données en SHS » et la table ronde « Les enjeux de l’open data pour la recherche qualitative »

Choix des ateliers

Prix du Festival:

CHF 120.- + TVA (3 ateliers)

Ce prix contient la participation à trois ateliers, les pauses café et 2 bons de repas et l’apéritif.

CHF 80.- + TVA (2 ateliers)

Ce prix contient la participation à deux ateliers, les pauses café et 2 bons de repas et l’apéritif.

Inscription

https://forscenter.ch/event/7eme-festival-suisse-des-methodes-qualitatives/

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