This course covers the foundations of designing, implementing and analysing basic online survey experiments in political science.
This course will be run in one session per day running over over 5 days.
The course hours are 1.00 pm - 3.30pm each day
Benjamin E. Goldsmith is a Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. His research is in the areas of international relations, comparative foreign policy, and atrocity forecasting. He is the author of the book Imitation in International Relations: Observational Learning, Analogies, and Foreign Policy in Russia and Ukraine, as well as articles in leading academic journals including American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Politics, Political Psychology, PNAS Nexus, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and World Politics. He was the founding President of the Australian Society for Quantitative Political Science, and is a member of the executives of the Pacific International Politics Conference and the Asian Political Methodology meeting. He was an editor of the Japanese Journal of Political Science (2019-25) and is on the editorial boards of International Relations of the Asia-Pacific and the Journal of East Asian Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (Michigan 2001) and an M.A. in Russian Area Studies (Georgetown 1995).
This course covers the foundations of designing, implementing and analysing basic online survey experiments in political science. It is intended for those with no or limited experience with online survey experiments.
Topics covered under survey design include:
- the inferential logic of experiments,
- choosing from different types of treatments,
- designing your experiment to achieve useful results,
- attention and manipulation checks,
- ensuring sufficient statistical power.
Topics covered under implementation include:
- piloting / testing,
- pre-registration,
- getting the sample you need,
- soft-launch,
- and fielding your survey.
Topics covered under analysis include:
- data cleaning and checking,
- hypothesis testing and data visualization in R,
- confirmatory and exploratory analysis,
- and issues of external validity.
All examples are drawn from the political science literature.
This course will run online using Zoom.
This course is intended for those with no or limited experience with online survey experiments.