The ACSPRI website has been updated. Please contact us by email, phone or using the chat function icon on the bottom right of the page if you have any difficulties navigating the site.
Survey Experiments for Political Science: Online
This course covers the foundations of designing, implementing and analysing basic online survey experiments in political science.
Instructor
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).
Course Level
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 be run in one session per day running over over 5 days.
The course hours are 1.00 pm - 3.30pm each day
This course is presented as part of the ANU Online Summer School in Political Analysis
This course is intended for those with no or limited experience with online survey experiments.
Thank you very much for your detailed feedback and for taking the time to review my materials so thoroughly. I truly appreciate the comments you added to the documents, as well as the written responses to my questions. Your guidance came at exactly the moment when I needed it most, and it has been immensely helpful for refining both components of my experimental design. It has been my great fortune to take your course this week. I learned a tremendous amount from your lectures and discussions, and your willingness to engage with each student’s project made the experience especially valuable.