Description of Courses

The Health and Retirement Study (hrsonline.isr.umich.edu) Summer Workshop is intended to give participants an introduction to the study that will enable them to use the data for research. HRS is a large-scale longitudinal study with more than 20 years of data on the labor force participation and health transitions that individuals undergo toward the end of their work lives and in the years that follow.

Disability Data in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is a 3-day online (Zoom) workshop intended to give participants an overview of the disability data resources in the HRS. Content lectures delivered by HRS co-investigators and content area experts will cover a range of topics including:

• The various ways that disability, disabling conditions, health, and functioning are measured in the HRS;
• How measures of disability have changed as the survey has evolved;
• ●        How the HRS captures disability benefit receipt in the survey and through and linkage with data from the Social Security Administration;
• ●        How disability-related topics like employer accommodations, assistive technology and personal assistance are measured in the survey.

In addition to presentations on these topics, the workshop will feature labs focused on working with work disability measures in Section M and disability spell data in the RAND HRS.

Students will have the opportunity to present research ideas and receive feedback from the workshop faculty and other students.

The course is designed for those with experience using HRS data or for those who have taken the introductory HRS workshop. The data training portion assumes some familiarity with STATA.

COURSE OBJECTIVES
• Introduce a structural analysis of parts of a survey question
• Introduce cognitive interviewing as a method for testing survey questions
• Describe guidelines for diagnosing problems in survey questions and writing new survey questions
• Focus on the structure and wording of survey questions, whether for interviewer-administered or self- administered instruments
• Provide an opportunity to apply the guidelines and principles during in-class exercises
• Focus on improving individual questions and sets of questions.
• Summarize research that underlies key decisions in writing survey questions.

DESCRIPTION

This workshop distills research about survey questions to principles that can be applied to write survey questions that are clear and obtain reliable answers. The workshop provides students with tools to use in diagnosing problems in survey questions and in writing their own survey questions. Sessions combine lecture with group exercises and discussion. The lecture provides guidelines for writing and revising survey questions and illustrates how to revise troubled questions. Assignments require that students analyze problematic questions, revise them, and administer them to fellow students. Sessions consider both questions about events and behaviors and questions about subjective phenomena (such as attitudes, evaluations, and internal
states).

WHO SHOULD ATTEND
Individuals who will be writing or reviewing survey questions or survey instruments or analyzing survey data. This course gives practical guidance to those who have written survey questions but who are not familiar with research on question design, those who are just beginning to design survey instruments, and those who use survey data but do not themselves design survey instruments.

Participants should have prior knowledge of questionnaire design before attending.

This course is designed to follow on from Introduction to Questionnaire Design or Designing
and Writing Questions for Surveys: Guidelines and Recommendations. Now instead of
looking at question comprehension from a cognitive side, the linguistic side will be explored
including online tools. Factual questions will be revisited but with the goal of exploring
different types of respondent memory problems. Solutions include basic aids to improve
memory and alternative methods: decomposition, calendars, event history calendars,
internet enabled devices, wearables, apps and sensors, and additional tasks on mobile
phones. Also covered are the effects of telescoping and quasi-facts. Subjective questions
will be revisited to understand attitude consistency and inconsistency and to cover the
popular topic of satisfaction and other customer experience metrics. Alternatives methods to
attitude measurement will also be covered: factorial surveys and multi-item scales. The
course concludes with multi-cultural issues raised by Rincón and a mini appendix on ways to
translate survey questions and evaluate the translation. The course will be interactive with
the goal of making it as close to in-person training as possible. There also will be workshops
throughout. Pamela is happy to chat with participants about their own questionnaires.

This course covers the basic principles of survey design and methods and introduces the necessary components of a good quality survey.   The course employs the Total Survey Error framework to discuss sampling frames and designs, modes of data collection and their effects on survey errors, the cognitive processes involved in answering survey questions and their impact on questionnaire design, pretesting methods and post-data collection processing.  The goal of the course is to give an introduction to the skills and resources needed to design and conduct a survey

In this two-week course, students will learn a variety of natural language processing methods for analyzing and extracting meaning from text data. The course will start with an introduction to text data, including text preprocessing and exploratory methods. The topics that follow will include machine learning models used for topic modeling, clustering, classification, sentiment analysis, and word embeddings. Students will also be introduced to web scraping. Considerations to both long and short texts of various subject matter. Class examples will be demonstrated primarily in R. This course assumes a bachelors-level background in Statistics or related field and knowledge of R or Python; no prior knowledge of text analysis is assumed.

The Health and Retirement Study (hrs.isr.umich.edu) workshop is intended to give participants an introduction to the study that will enable them to get started using the data for research. HRS is a large-scale longitudinal study with more than 20 years of data on the labor force participation and health transitions that individuals undergo toward the end of their work lives and in the years that follow. This online workshop is intended for users who have little to no experience using HRS data.

Content lectures delivered by HRS co-investigators and content area experts on basic survey content, sample design, weighting, and restricted data files will be available on the course website for viewing ahead of time. During the week of the workshop, each content lecturer will participate in a Zoom meeting with the class to answer questions about their lecture. The majority of each day will be devoted to data labs in which participants will gain experience using the data, with a strong focus on introductory data management and simple data analysis.

The data lab portion assumes some familiarity with Stata. We will provide a temporary site license for Stata and an introductory Stata training module that participants can complete ahead of the workshop to be well prepared. The programming code for the labs will also be provided in SAS.

The Pathways program offers a synchronous virtual introductory program to upper-level undergraduate students and those in the post-baccalaureate stage on the topics of data-driven survey and data science. 

Exceptional program participants interested in pursuing graduate education in survey and data science will be invited to visit the Michigan Program in Survey and Data Science (MPSDS) at a later date.

Course Description:

The Pathways program will introduce social science research methods in general, its link to survey and data science, and research projects around the Survey Research Center (SRC) at the Institute for Social Research (ISR). Led by faculty instructors from MPSDS, the primary goal is to share our excitement about survey and data science as a research field and a career path by focusing on principles, theories and hands-on approaches to generating social science data.

Who is Eligible?

Upper-level undergraduate students and those in the post-baccalaureate stage with interest in social science research.

Cost:

The Pathways program is free of charge. Participants are required to pay a $50 deposit to reserve their spot. After successful completion of the full course, the deposit will be refunded.

Schedule:

We offer two options for 2025:

• Summer Program: July 28 – August 8, 2025, Mondays-Fridays, 12-1pm EST 
• Fall Program: October 4 – 26, 2025, Saturdays and Sundays, 12-1pm EST

The application deadline for the Summer Pathways Program is June 15th, 2025. For the Fall Program, the deadline is September 12, 2025. The application requires completing the application form and submitting a transcript and a letter of recommendation. Admission decisions are made on a rolling basis.

The Pathways program offers a synchronous virtual introductory program to upper-level undergraduate students and those in the post-baccalaureate stage on the topics of data-driven survey and data science. 

Exceptional program participants interested in pursuing graduate education in survey and data science will be invited to visit the Michigan Program in Survey and Data Science (MPSDS) at a later date.

Course Description:

The Pathways program will introduce social science research methods in general, its link to survey and data science, and research projects around the Survey Research Center (SRC) at the Institute for Social Research (ISR). Led by faculty instructors from MPSDS, the primary goal is to share our excitement about survey and data science as a research field and a career path by focusing on principles, theories and hands-on approaches to generating social science data.

Who is Eligible?

Upper-level undergraduate students and those in the post-baccalaureate stage with interest in social science research.

Cost:

The Pathways program is free of charge. Participants are required to pay a $50 deposit to reserve their spot. After successful completion of the full course, the deposit will be refunded.

Schedule:

We offer two options for 2025:

• Summer Program: July 28 – August 8, 2025, Mondays-Fridays, 12-1pm EST 
• Fall Program: October 4 – 26, 2025, Saturdays and Sundays, 12-1pm EST

The application deadline for the Summer Pathways Program is June 15th, 2025. For the Fall Program, the deadline is September 12, 2025. The application requires completing the application form and submitting a transcript and a letter of recommendation. Admission decisions are made on a rolling basis.

This course will focus on semi-structured, or in-depth, interviewing, with a brief introduction to other qualitative methods, including observation. Semi-structured interviewing is often most helpful in understanding complex social processes.  We will examine the goals, assumptions, process, and uses of interviewing and compare these methods to other related qualitative and quantitative methods in order to develop research designs appropriate to research goals. The course will cover all aspects of interviewing, including how to decide who to interview, how to ask good interview questions, and how to conduct successful interviews. Students will conduct interviews, and discuss the process and outcome of those interviews. We will examine the strengths and weaknesses of this methodology, particularly through discussion of some of the critiques of these methods.