Short course on smartphones at ESRA conference, Lisbon.

Peter Lugtig and Vera Toepoel will teach a short course titled ‘smartphones: surveys and sensors’ at the upcoming ESRA conference

2017 marks the 10-year anniversary of the release of the Iphone, and of smartphones becoming a mainstream device. In many countries, smartphones are replacing traditional PCs and laptops as the primary device to browse the Internet, and use social media. In the last couple of years, researchers have experimented with smartphones as a method of data collection. This short course focuses on recent studies that have aimed to study how smartphones can be used. 1. As a device to administer surveys and 2. To acquire additional behavorial data using sensors. In particular we will discuss:

– why you should want to do research using smartphones

– how web questionnaires should be adapted to become smartphone-friendly

– issues related to willingness and consent to participate in smartphone studies that collect behavorial data

– how such behavorial data can potentially be used to enrich survey data, using GPS locations as an example.

It is helpful if participants to the short course bring a smartphone with them, as well as a laptop. We will not do any data-analysis during the short course, but will provide a small dataset with GPS location data collected using smartphones. We will use this dataset to illustrate and discuss how such data can be used to enrich survey data.

Registration through the website of ESRA: http://www.europeansurveyresearch.org/