Masterclass with Ulf Liebe: “Factorial Survey Experiments in Social Sciences”

26 04 2023

Prof. Ulf Liebe from the University of Warwick will hold a workshop on “Factorial Survey Experiments in Social Sciences” on 15 May from 9.45-16.00.

The meeting will take place at the Centre for Excellence in Social Sciences at BUW (2nd floor, room 2.90).

A detailed workshop schedule and registration form are available at: https://bit.ly/41trYYx.

The workshop will be held in English.

Factorial Survey Experiments in Social Sciences

Many social, economic, environmental, and political problems depend on various factors and can only be solved by involving citizens and changing social norms in societies. It is therefore crucial to learn more about individuals’ beliefs, attitudes, and subjective norms, as well as the underlying factors. But it is difficult to examine the causal effect of multiple determinants, and survey research on beliefs, attitudes, and norms has to deal with different forms of bias. Respondents might untruthfully answer survey questions in line with social norms, political rules, and in a way to please the researchers. Factorial survey experiments (FSEs)/vignette experiments can help to avoid such biases because they do not measure the concepts directly via single survey items but indirectly, based on the variation of different factors. They further single out the importance of different factors and combinations thereof for evaluating social, economic, environmental, or political problems. Based on an experimental design they allow to estimate causal effects of various factors on the outcome at hand. If designed accordingly, FSEs can also help to test theoretical mechanisms and competing theoretical hypotheses. FSEs are applied to a wide range of issues in both Global North and Global South including acceptance of environmental policy, acceptance of refugees, perceived fairness of gender pay gaps, hiring decision making, public perceptions of crime and punishment, normative beliefs related to marriage and child education. This course will provide an overview of FSEs. Participants will get familiar with the (theoretical) foundations of these experiments, experimental designs, statistical models to analyse FSEs, as well as methodological challenges. As part of this course, participants will design their own FSE.

Prof. Ulf Liebe is a Professor of Sociology and Quantitative Methods and the Director of the Warwick Q-Step Centre at the University of Warwick, UK. His research interests include discrimination, environmental behaviour, multifactorial survey experiments, prosociality, survey methodology, sustainability. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/summaries/liebeu/