The General Social Survey’s Grand Pivot and the Future of Big Survey Science – Prof. Jeremy Freese
Join us for the Data Sciences Speaker Series with Prof. Jeremy Freese, the chair of Sociology at Stanford University. This talk is co-sponsored by the Data Sciences Institute and the University of Toronto Scarborough.
Registration Required – REGISTER HERE
- Date: March 18, 2024
- Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
- Format: In-person
- Location: Data Sciences Institute, 10th floor Seminar Room, 700 University Avenue, Toronto
Talk Title: The General Social Survey’s Grand Pivot and the Future of Big Survey Science
Description:
Now in its sixth decade, the General Social Survey is regarded as the most authoritative source for many public opinion trends in the United States, as well as the US participant in the largest cross-national initiative for comparative public opinion data. GSS is the most used dataset in US sociology besides data directly collected by the government. For nearly all of its history, the GSS has been predominantly administered face-to-face, but survey costs and participation trends have led the GSS to embark in its most recent surveys on a future in which many, perhaps most, respondents will participate online. What does this mean for a survey for which the accurate. documentation of social trends has been its most prominent feature? The question is approached through a series of issues, some of which may seem abstruse or picayune, that together highlight the complex future facing population-based survey design, especially for sustaining the method as a tool of comparison over time, between groups and across societies.
Biography:
Jeremy Freese is a Professor and a Chair of the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. Since 2015, he has been co-PI of the General Social Survey, which will be the centerpiece of his talk, and for even longer he has been co-PI of Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences (TESS), a project to support population-based survey experiments in the social sciences. His own research focuses on the intersection of biological, psychological, and social characteristics in the context of social change and social inequality. He is also the co-author of books on discrete choice methods and on transparent, reproducible research methods for social sciences