Summary

Join us for the 2025 edition of our Summer School in Survey Methodology and participate in our one-week courses in Cologne!

Description

Registration is open!

Courses will take place either at GESIS Cologne, online via Zoom, or in a hybrid format (both onsite and online participation possible). Online courses will be held live at Central European Summer Time (CEST) and will not be recorded.

If you are interested in survey design and implementation, you will have the opportunity to start with an introductory course on survey design, explore web surveys or conjoint survey experiments, or take your skills to the next level with our advanced questionnaire design course. For those interested in data analysis techniques, we offer courses on causal inference and small area estimation methods for survey researchers, as well as data science techniques for analyzing both survey and big data. Finally, you can also learn about survey sampling and weighting or handling missing data with multiple imputation.

 In addition to our one-week courses, we offer online/hybrid two-to-three-day short courses. This year, you can discover all of the stages of designing effective questionnaires for cross-cultural surveys, and you can enhance your knowledge of causal inference with DAGs. If you are looking to build your software skills, you can choose between our courses on introduction to Stata or R.

Since 2012, GESIS has been organizing a Summer School covering survey methodology, research design, and data collection and analysis. Initially held exclusively at GESIS in Cologne, Germany, it expanded to online options in 2020. This setup brings together lecturers and participants from all over the world and many different fields, fostering a collaborative, global learning environment.

Program

Week 1 (23–25 July) – Short Courses

Introduction to R for Data Analysis [onsite | 23–24 July]

Introduction to Stata for Data Management and Analysis [hybrid | 23–24 July]

Developing, Translating, and Pretesting Questionnaires for Cross-cultural Surveys [online | 23–25 July]

Week 2 (28 July–01 August)

Advanced Questionnaire Design [onsite] 

Survey Sampling and Weighting [onsite] 

Designing and Implementing Web Surveys [onsite] 

Causal Inference with Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) [online | 29–31 July]

Week 3 (04–08 August)

Causal Inference in the Social Sciences [onsite] 

Data Science Techniques for Survey Researchers [onsite] 

Introduction to Conjoint Survey Experiments [onsite] 

Week 4 (11–15 August)

Missing Data and Multiple Imputation [onsite] 

Introduction to Survey Design [onsite] 

Introduction to Small Area Estimation [onsite] 

Scholarships, ECTS Credits & More

4 Scholarships are available to Summer School participants for one-week courses. Grants are disbursed by the European Survey Research Association (ESRA).

Reasons to attend 

As a graduate or PhD student, post-doc, junior or senior researcher, or survey professional, you will:

• receive high quality training in state-of-the-art techniques and methods of survey research,
• obtain a comprehensive overview of different survey methods or delve deeply into niche topics of interest to you,
• acquire essential skills in how to design, plan, conduct, and document all kinds of surveys,
• gain insights into survey data collection processes,
• learn techniques for analyzing survey data and assessing data quality,
• network with peers from different fields and from all over the world to discuss research and share ideas.

GESIS is happy to assist you!

Should you be unsure which course is the right one for you, please do not hesitate to contact GESIS.

Prerequisites

Each course has specific prerequisites, which will be detailed on the course webpages.

In addition, you are expected to:

• have a basic knowledge of empirical research methods,
• have a good command of English.