… no, I don’t have a report to submit by tomorrow …
… what do you mean the file is locked by another user? you mean myself?
… and yet, we strangely get there!
Working from home…
MIPEX 2020 to launch on 9 December
Yes, MIPEX has been brought up to date! The global launch is due:
After months working together with local partners, MPG is now happy to invite you to the International Launch of MIPEX2020 taking place on December 9 from 2PM-3.30PM CET. The event will take place via Zoom Webinar and we very much look forward to welcoming you all to have an enriching discussion about MIPEX2020, its different areas, indicators, and international trends on integration policies.
You’ll have to register by 6 December 2020: Link to invitation and registration
Quick and Dirty Covid-19 Online Surveys: Why?
Everyone seems to be an epidemiologist these days. I have long lost count on the surveys that land in my inbox. It’s clear that the internet has made it very cheap to field surveys, especially surveys where questions of sampling don’t seem to be relevant to those fielding the surveys. It’s also clear that tools like SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics make it easy to field surveys quickly. But that’s no excuse for some of the surveys I’ve seen:
- surveys with no apparent flow between questions
- surveys where the e-mail makes it clear that they are desperate to get any answers
- surveys with incomplete flow logic (see example below)
- surveys that ask hardly anything about the respondent (like age, sex, education, location)
- surveys that throw in about any instrument that could be vaguely related to how people respond to Covid-19 (with no apparent focus; which is bound to find ‘interesting’ and statistically ‘significant’ results)
- double negatives in questions
- two questions in one
For example, how should I answer this required question at the bottom here? What if I assume corruption is evenly spread across all sectors, or not present at all?
I understand that we want to get numbers on the various ways Covid-19 affected us, but with surveys like these we’re not going to learn anything because they do not allow meaningful inferences. In that case, it’s sometimes better not to run a survey then pretending to have data.
C4P: Workshop on Survey Experiments in Migration and Integration Research
Flavia Fossati and I are organizing an international workshop on “Survey Experiments in Migration and Integration Research” and would like to cordially invite you to contribute a paper to this event, which will be hosted at the University of Lausanne (IDHEAP) on June 4-5th 2020.
This is the third meeting of a series of international workshops previously held in Switzerland at the Universities of Lausanne and Berne that aim at gathering experts on the topic and to have in-depth discussions on their work in progress.
In this edition of the Survey Experiment in Migration and Integration Research, we will have a few different panels that focus on the survey experiment methodology and others that focus more on the immigration and integration research that is carried out by means of such experimental methods.
The event will be accompanied by two keynote speeches, one by Prof. Katrin Auspurg (University of Munich) and Prof. Donald Green (Columbia University).
Please apply by following this link: http://idheap.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8B2srd4kq2HIyEd
Deadline February 15th 2020.
More Support and Templates in SciFlow
SciFlow is an online editor for academics. They have recently updated and expanded the documentation, so should you ever get stuck, here’s how to. That said, the interface is pretty intuitive, so I’m not sure you’ll ever need to navigate to the support pages for basic editing.
There are some useful hints, though, like using zbib (Zotero) with Sciflow (instructions here). This gets pretty close to Authorea’s citation feature, and is also useful for collaborative texts (and doesn’t suffer from the slowness of direct Zotero/Mendeley connections if you have a large database of references).
The SciFlow team have also recently updated the Templates feature:
There are many journal styles to choose from. It’s not quite (yet) like typeset.io, but the social sciences are not well covered by typeset anyway. SciFlow offers some useful templates, but in most cases, it’s necessary to do some finishing before submitting to a journal. On the other hand, there’s a template for minutes — that’s useful for anyone working in a team, and who isn’t?
In most cases the generic templates will do, including the SciFlow templates which support many common citation styles.
Didier Ruedin 