Analysis of Survey Panel Data: Spring School 2009-Registration Open

The Oxford Spring School in Quantitative Methods for Social Research will take place 23-27 March 2009 at the Department of Politics and International Relations.

Panel surveys involve asking a set of respondents the same questions on more than one occasion. They are particularly valuable for understanding how individuals change over time and so they are often the most important source of data for assessing individual-level causal hypotheses in the social sciences.

The Spring School is a week of intensive short courses that you can take on pick-and-mix basis, or do the whole package. It starts with two half-day Crash Courses on two major pieces of statistical software, Stata and R. Stata will be used in the Wednesday and Friday courses and anyone participating in those courses will need to be familiar with Stata to the level of the Crash Course. Knowledge of R will be helpful but not required for the Introduction to Survey Panel Data Analysis on the Tuesday. This course covers the basic concepts, issues and statistical models for survey panel data analysis, and will serve as key background to the courses on more specific techniques that follow. Random-effects models (also known as mixed-models or multilevel models for repeated measures) are covered on the Wednesday. The Thursday course considers the issue of how to extend measurement models (in which several survey items are used as indicators for one or more underlying/latent dimensions) to the panel context. Finally, event history analysis (also known as survival or duration data analysis) is introduced in the Friday course.

While the topics have been chosen to cover techniques that will be particularly useful for those seeking to analyse panel surveys, the courses will also be relevant to those with other kinds of panel data. Moreover, the Introduction to Event History Analysis will be of interest to those with duration data of any kind.

All the Spring School courses are very short and intensive ‘Introductions’ rather than longer comprehensive treatments of the subject matter, but they seek to provide a good overview of the main material and practical experience of how to apply some of the key techniques.

Registration closes at noon Wednesday 18th February

For further information please visit our website and view the programme.