Collection, Management, and Analysis of Twitter Data
As a highly relevant platform for political and social online interactions, researchers increasingly analyze Twitter data. As of 01/2021, Twitter renewed its API, which now includes access to the full history of tweets for academic usage. In this Methods Bites Tutorial, Andreas Küpfer (Technical University of Darmstadt & MZES) presents a walkthrough of the collection, management, and analysis of Twitter data. Continue reading
Survey data collection from start to finish
Surveys have long been a staple of social science research on individuals’ attitudes and behaviors. In recent years, however, we have witnessed a strong shift from secondary analyses of large general social surveys toward smaller, more targeted primary data collections. This development has been accompanied by the increasing availability of affordable and easy-to-implement surveys using online access panels. While the entry barriers to original survey-based research are now likely lower than ever before, it still comes with notable methodological, administrative, and logistic challenges. To help aspiring survey researchers navigate this process, this Methods Bites Instructional by Joshua Hellyer (MZES, University of Mannheim) provides a comprehensive guide to survey data collection with online access panels. Continue reading
Telling Stories with Data: Insights into Data Journalism
Telling stories with data is one of the most important things to do for almost everyone working with data analyses. Why? Because its goal is reaching the audience one wants to reach. If one succeeds therein – be it, for example, average news consumers or academics in a specific field –, the underlying data analysis will more probably have a lasting impact. A good story drags the audience into your analysis. In this Methods Bites Tutorial, Yannik Buhl offers a recap of his workshop “Telling Stories with Data: Insights into Data Journalism” in the MZES Social Science Data Lab during Spring 2021. It focuses on the important steps to tell a thorough story based on data analyses – and how scientists and data journalists can learn from each other. Continue reading
Using Geospatial Data in R
The use of geospatial data – data that can be mapped using geographic information systems (GIS) – has become increasingly widespread in the social sciences. Applications not only extend to the analysis of classical geographical entities (e.g., policy diffusion across spatially proximate countries) but increasingly also to analyses of micro-level data, including respondent information from georeferenced surveys or user trace data from Tweets. In this Methods Bites Tutorial, Stefan Jünger (GESIS) and Denis Cohen (MZES) show how to retrieve, manage, and visualize geospatial data in R. Continue reading