Survey research in the digital age at UCB Colloquium

Mon, Feb 1, 2-3:30pm in 402 Barrows Hall 

Survey research in the digital age: The past, present, and very bright future 

The digital age has transformed how researchers are able to study social behavior. Contrary to claims about the demise of the survey, in this talk, I will argue that the digital age actually increases the value of surveys. I will use the traditional total survey error framework to organize the landscape, and then I’ll highlight three broad areas for development: changes in who we ask, changes in how we ask, and changes in how we link surveys to other sources of data. The talk will conclude with some predictions for the future. This talk represents one chapter from a book I’m currently writing about social research in the digital age.  

Matthew Salganik is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. Salganik's research has been published in journals such as Science, PNAS, Sociological Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. His papers have won the Outstanding Article Award from the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New Yorker. Salganik's research is funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Joint United Nations Program for HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Facebook, and Google.