Patrick Lown is a Research Fellow in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. His work focuses on perceptions of social inequality and economic status, and how these perceptions shape attitudes towards redistribution, taxation, and social welfare programmes. His work contributes to broader debates in political behaviour and public opinion, and their consequences for beliefs and attitudes regarding redistribution and social welfare programs. In addition to his research, he is as Lab Manager of ESSEXLab, the experimental social sciences laboratory at the University of Essex.

Course Description
An intensive overview of how to form policy-relevant research questions, design survey instruments to test them, consider practical elements of fielding a survey, and analyse your collected data.  Familiarity with the R statistical programming environment is recommended but not required.

Module 1: Introduction to survey research and design
The fundamentals of good survey research and an introduction on how to conduct your own with an eye toward policy analysis.

Module 2: Survey data interpretation and analysis
Learn how to evaluate existing survey research and analyse your own in Excel and R, including basic visualization.

Module 3: DIY: the practicalities of successfully conducting your own survey
Learn the ins-and-outs of how to approach fielding your own survey, including how to reach respondents, avoiding common pitfalls, troubleshooting problems as they arise.

Applications open soon!

Course Outline

Module 1: Introduction to survey research and design
This module focuses on introducing the basic nuts and bolts of survey research with an eye toward applying it to policy analysis.
• Introduction survey research
• Developing research questions for policy analysis
• Sampling
• Assessing and building survey instruments
• Basic causality and simple experiments

 

Module 2: Survey data interpretation and analysis
This module introduces how to interpret, key survey statistics, evaluate them for quality, and conduct your own basic-to-intermediate analyses.
• Brief introduction to working in R
• Understanding and reporting survey statistics
• Analysis of survey data – crosstabs and key results
• Visualising survey data
• Applying survey weights for population comparisons

 

Module 3: Fielding a successful survey and advanced survey research
This module provides an introduction to the practical matters of executing a survey and an exploration of several more advanced topics.
• Ethics and data protection for survey research
• Data sources and advanced sampling in the field
• Budgeting for data collection
• Avoiding and troubleshooting common problems
• Launching and monitoring a survey
• Conjoint experiments