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, Feldkirchenstraße 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 courses.bagss(at)uni-bamberg.de by 08 October 2024.

Online-Workshop: "Introduction to Python Programming for Social Scientists" (02.12.2024, 09.00 a.m. to 02.30 p.m. (s.t.) & 09.12.2024, 09.00 a.m to 02.30 p.m. (s.t.))

This workshop is organised by BAGSS.

Course Outline:

The first day of the workshop will cover Python basics. You will get an introduction of the Jupyter Notebook, essential modules, data types, operators, conditional statements, functions, loops, compound data types, and comprehensions used in Python. This session concludes with hands-on exercises. In the afternoon, you'll learn web scraping with practical exercises.

The second day will focus on data analysis in social sciences using pandas with the Titanic dataset, creating visualizations using Matplotlib and Seaborn, and a brief insight into advanced techniques like principal component analysis and regression methods.

After each day you can work on assignments, for which you can get detailed feedback by the trainer.

Prerequisites: No prequisites are required.

Target group: The workshop is mainly aimed at doctoral students. In case of any vacant places, it is open to anyone interested.

Date & time: Monday, December 02, 2024, 09.00 a.m. to 02.30 p.m. (s.t.) & Monday, December 09, 2024, 09.00 a.m. to 02.30 p.m. (s.t.)

Location: Online via Zoom

Instructor: Rebeka O. Szabó, PhD, Corvinus University of Budapest

Rebeka O. Szabó is an assistant professor at the Center for Collective Learning, Corvinus University of Budapest. She is the leader of the Organizational Dynamics Group. Rebeka holds a PhD in network science from the Central European University, and has a background in sociology. She has been researching organizational and team dynamics (in escape rooms). Rebeka’s main scientific interest covers social networks, teams, organizations, and applied social psychology.

Course units: 12

Registration: Please register via courses.bagss(at)uni-bamberg.de by November 5, 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, Feldkirchenstraße 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 courses.bagss(at)uni-bamberg.de by November 27, 2024.