The Research and Study Group will organize the sessions at the ESRA 2019 conference

Members of the RSG will organize two sessions at the international methodological conference of the European Survey Research Association, which will be held in the capital of Croatia in July 2019.

The European Survey Research Association (ESRA) is an organization dedicated to the development of the methodology for conducting and analyzing mass surveys. The ESRA 2019 conference ("Highlighting the contribution of survey research in the changing data environment") aims to bring together social researchers and data science professionals to discuss the new opportunities and challenges presented by the growing data flow.

The organizing committee approved two applications for the RSG to hold its sessions within the conference. The first section, which will be organized by Svetlana Zhuchkova, is directed to the primary object of research of the RSG, i.e., possibilities of selection and use of interaction effects in predictive models. The expected topics of the reports in this session are devoted to the comparison of methods of searching for interactions, ways to overcome possible difficulties in the construction and interpretation of predictive models, as well as best practices in the construction of such models.

The second session (led by Alexey Rotmistrov) is related to the ongoing activities of the RSG and is devoted to the possibilities and limitations of using web scraping as a method of data collection for social research. Can web scraping be a worthy analog or a substitute for the standard survey data and what are the limits of such an approach? Participants in their reports are invited to respond to these questions, and demonstrate their own experience in the use of web scraping and obtained data.

Applications for participation in the conference with the report will be accepted in September.