ESRA 2023 sessions by theme

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Session Details

Adding geospatial information to survey data offers new perspectives for social science research. It allows researchers to address regional context effects that play an important role in many research areas. Moreover, combining individual survey data with (aggregated) regional data can aid in closing data gaps and reducing study costs. Over the past years, survey projects have been increasingly enriched with geo-information, for instance, by adding geopositions or municipality codes of survey participants’ residence. In addition, many external data sources of regional indicators across various levels of aggregation are readily available. This includes, but is not limited to, administrative data, social media data, smart data, or satellite imagery. However, survey practitioners are still facing many challenges in managing, linking, and analyzing survey data in conjunction with geospatial data, thus, lots of potential for innovative research which combines survey and geodata remains untapped.

The proposed conference session offers the opportunity to exchange expertise on new developments in linking survey data with geospatial information and regional indicators. Possible questions to be discussed are:

- What are potential sources of regional indicators and geospatial information that can be combined with survey data?
- What methods and procedures exist to retrieve and manage big spatial data from online sources?
- How to harmonize area changes over time when analyzing longitudinal survey data?
- How to assure the high data security standards needed for sensitive georeferenced survey data?
- Which techniques from geospatial analytics can be incorporated in common methods for cross-sectional and longitudinal survey data analysis?
- What are applications that highlight the potential of analyzing georeferenced survey data?