Presentations and conferences

The first international user conference provides the opportunity to present and discuss research results which deal with the student and academic life course from a longitudinal perspective. Contributions to the conference should preferably address a topic from the following areas: Determinants of educational pathways, career paths and returns, careers in science, internationalization. Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed method research results are equally welcome. The conference addresses researchers at different stages of their academic career, early stage researchers as well as PhDs and other senior researchers. Users of DZHW data are especially encouraged to present their findings.

The course will introduce participants in the logic and application of the explorative method of social sequence analysis. The participants will learn which kind of research questions can be answered and how they can implement this practically by using the user-written sq-ado and the sadi-plugin for the software Stata. The course includes examples and practical exercises with data provided by the DZHW (DZHW Graduate Panel 2009).

Paradata, such as user agent strings (UAS), provide us with important client-side information about the technical conditions of web surveys. If due to different reasons for example data protection issues UAS are not available, one may directly ask survey participants for the required data. Until now it is unclear whether the validity of these self-reported paradata is determined by participants' general attitudes towards surveys, their willingness to participate and - in connection with technically demanding questions - distraction while answering.
To shed light into the question what predicts the consistency between UAS and self-reported paradata, we use the HISBUS Online Access Panel. The sample comprised 3.137 members with UAS...

Besides others, general attitudes towards surveys are part of respondent's motivation for survey participation. There is empirical evidence that these attitudes do predict participant's willingness to perform supportively during (online) surveys (de Leeuw et al. 2017; Jungermann/Stocké 2017; Stocké 2006). Hence, the Survey Attitude Scale (SAS) as proposed by de Leeuw et al. (2010) differentiates between three dimensions: (i) survey enjoyment, (ii) survey value, and (iii) survey burden. Referring to de Leeuw et al. 2017, we investigate into the question whether the SAS measurements can be compared across different online survey samples of students from German Higher Education Institutions (HEI).

Switching from paper questionnaires to online surveys presents massive methodological challenges. To date, little is known about how these surveys have to be designed in order to achieve the highest possible data quality and to continue existing time series. Therefore, an Experimental Study on the Methodology of Online Surveys (ESMO 1) will be carried out in 2017. About 25,000 participants of a randomly recruited online access panel of German students are invited. They are randomly assigned to various conditions of eight scenarios assumed to influence response behavior. At the conference we will present the complete RCT design and initial results