Survey Design and Implementation International Workshop at IFiS PAN, March 18–20, 2019

From March 18–20, 2019 the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology (ifispan.pl) is hosting the Comparative Survey Design and Implementation International Workshop (CSDI, csdiworkshop.org), with financial and organizational support from the Polish Academy of Sciences (pan.pl), IFiS PAN, CONSIRT of the Ohio State University (OSU) and PAN (consirt.osu.edu), and CSDI.
CSDI enjoys high scientific recognition in the field of comparative survey methodology, as they provide guidelines and best practices for all elements that form the lifecycle of multicultural surveys (ccsg.isr.umich.edu). CSDI annual workshops constitute a forum and platform of collaboration for scholars involved in research relevant for comparative survey methods.
At the 2019 CSDI International Workshop, members of the SDR Project of OSU and IFiS PAN are organizing the session Harmonizing Panel Survey Data for Multi-Cultural Research. By repeatedly collecting information from the same individuals, panel surveys are best suited for analyzing the conditions, causes and consequences of change that people experience over time. Yet, because they are costly to field, such data are underrepresented among survey studies; international panels are especially rare. A solution that can facilitate cross-national research using panel data collected in different countries and time periods is the harmonization of these data. For single-country panel studies with well-defined research agendas, researchers can identify theoretically relevant variables and harmonize them ex-post. For ongoing panels, researchers can harmonize ex-ante selected variables that pertain to specific research topic(s), so that subsequent rounds of each single-country study will contain the needed data for comparative analyses. Researchers can harmonize prior waves of the panel survey ex-post and prepare them for ex-ante harmonization. However, as one needs to consider both between- and within-panel harmonization, this strategy poses significant yet surmountable methodological challenges. This session invites theoretical and empirical contributions to methods that are designed to evaluate and improve the comparability of extant panel survey datasets, as well as strategies for harmonization and the analysis of data from different panel studies.
Dr. Irina Tomescu-Dubrow