Spring School 2025 montage. | Images: © Tom Weller
Oxford Spring School in Advanced Research Methods offers graduate students and researchers from universities across the UK and abroad a unique opportunity to learn cutting-edge methods in social science.
The week-long event, which took place this year from 31 March to 4 April, has been running for 22 years and this year a total of 125 students attended, both in person and online.
The programme for 2025 consisted of the following nine courses in quantitative and qualitative methods:
- Data Analysis for the Social Sciences
- Qualitative Methods: Interviews and Fieldwork
- Machine Learning
- Time Series Analysis
- Causal Inference 1: Social Science Experiments
- Text Analysis
- Large Language Models
- Advanced Qualitative Methods: Process Tracing
- Causal Inference 2: Design-Based Approaches
The dates, courses, and further information about Oxford Spring School 2026 will be announced later this year.
This is what previous students had to say about Oxford Spring School:
The instruction during the Spring School is effective, providing for a surprising amount of learning in only a single week. The Spring School community is also very positive, diverse and engaged. This is truly a great learning environment.”
The Spring School was a truly unique experience for me, for two main reasons. First, it allowed me to engage deeply with the field of machine learning, which is rarely covered in depth during academic education. My lecturer delivered the material with such enthusiasm and passion that it was an absolute pleasure to follow his teaching, motivating me even further to explore machine learning in greater depth.
Second, I found it both inspiring and enriching to experience the atmosphere of the University of Oxford and to exchange ideas with fellow participants from across disciplines and backgrounds. I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to the organising team for the smooth running of the event.
Hear Spring School’s Academic Director Spyros Kosmidis and one of this year’s course tutors, Marnie Howlett, discuss Spring School: