Innovating social research by using existing survey data to build new databases 2 |
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| Coordinator 1 | Mr Christof Wolf (GESIS Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences) |
| Coordinator 2 | Ms Irina Tomescu-Dubrow (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences ) |
Survey research in the social sciences can look back at more than 80 successful years. During this period survey data have become one of the most important sources of data for social research. Increasingly, these data are available for secondary research and offer great opportunities for combining and cumulating different sources to cover longer time periods and/or different countries. The modern history of many (western) countries can now be based on these data reflecting the development of social differentiation and social structure as well as changing values, attitudes and behaviors.
This session invites presentations that exploit the value of combined data sources to study social change or cross-national comparisons. We also invite presentations dealing with the methodological or practical challenges faced by projects striving to combine survey data for secondary usage, as well as challenges of analyzing combined data sources. These challenges might include questions of finding and accessing data, variability in data quality, the availability of relevant documentation, the identification of “identical” measures across different sources, how to weight respondents' answers in combined data sources, etc.