MacMillan-CSAP Workshop on Quantitative Research Methods: Matthew Salganik, Princeton & Microsoft

Event time: 
Thursday, September 26, 2013 - 4:00pm through 5:10pm
Event description: 

Matthew Salganik

Professor of Sociology at Princeton University & Senior Research at Microsoft New York City

Wiki surveys: Quantifiable and open social data collection

ABSTRACT: Research about attitudes and opinions is central to social science and relies on two common methodological approaches: surveys and interviews. While surveys enable the quantification of large amounts of information quickly and at a reasonable cost, they are routinely criticized for being “top-down” and rigid. In contrast, interviews allow unanticipated information to “bubble up” directly from respondents, but are slow, expensive, and difficult to quantify. Advances in computing technology now enable a hybrid approach that combines the quantifiability of a survey and the openness of an interview; we call this new class of data collection tools wiki surveys. Drawing on principles underlying successful information aggregation projects, such as Wikipedia, we propose three general criteria that wiki surveys should satisfy: they should be greedy, collaborative, and adaptive. We then present results from www .allourideas.org, a free and open-source website we created that enables groups all over the world to deploy wiki surveys. To date, more than 3,500 wiki surveys have been created, and they have collected over 175,000 ideas and 4.5 million votes.  We describe the methodological challenges involved in collecting and analyzing this type of data and present a case study of a wiki survey created by the New York City Mayor’s Office.  [Joint work with Karen E.C. Levy]

This workshop series is being sponsored by the ISPS Center for the Study of American Politics and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale with support from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund.

Event type 
Workshop