Courses and Workshops
Welcome to our Courses and Workshops page. This section is dedicated to providing information about the various educational opportunities offered by our research group, such as materials or registration links.
The data quality group teaches annual courses in the Utrecht Summer School. The courses take place in the second half of August. They are offered in-person on 5 consecutive days. Housing, and a social programme are offered too. Utrecht is lovely in summer, so if interested please follow the links below to detailed information.
Survey Research: Design, Implementation and Data Processing
Next iteration: 11-15 August 2025
This course covers the essentials of modern survey methodology. It focuses on survey quality and the reduction of the Total Survey Error while balancing logistics and survey costs. The course introduces topics, such as coverage, sampling, nonresponse, optimal questionnaire development and design as well as mode effects. Changes in technology and society strongly influence modern survey research. This course covers the essentials of modern survey methodology and analysis. Topics include state of the art survey design, questionnaire construction and testing, modes of and devices for data collection, data processing and survey analysis techniques, such as nonresponse analysis and scale and index construction and the design of multi-source statistics. Best practice guidelines for phases of the survey from design to implementation, analysis and reporting will be discussed. International comparative and longitudinal surveys are included. Best practice guidelines for surveys from design to implementation, analysis and reporting will be discussed.
Graduate students, academic researchers, researchers in the public and private sector, heads of departments, managers, and commissioners of research are increasingly dealing with surveys. This course is intended as an introduction at master/graduate level for those who are new to modern survey methodology and as a refresher course for those with some experience in survey methodology. Current developments will be reviewed and research literature will be discussed.The course includes consultation sessions on Friday afternoon.
During this course, participants have the valuable opportunity to tap into on-location expertise. Our instructors are seasoned survey methodologist with extensive experience in pretesting, questionnaire design, measurement quality assessment, and proficiency in conducting web surveys and mixed-device surveys.
Advanced Survey Design
next iteration: 18-22 August 2025
This five-day course in survey design takes students beyond the introductory courses offered in BA and MA programmes, and discusses current issues in one of the most important data collection methods: surveys. Specifically, it focuses on doing surveys in the Internet-era. It will show how to collect data in online surveys, using smartphones, and mixing surveys with Big data, such as digital behavioral data, smartphone sensors or administrative data. It combines short one-hour lectures with exercises on most of the topics discussed. Course participants must be proficient in working with statistical software. Course materials are prepared for working with R.
We present new ways to analyse modern surveys, including non-probability survey designs, smartphone data collection, digital trace data and data collected via apps. Course participants must be proficient working with the statistical software package R at the level of at least knowing Tidy and multivariate regression in R.