«Methodology of a field research»: scientific seminar in Saint Petersburg, May 25-26

A two-day seminar was held in the Saint-Petersburg’s HSE department on the 25th-26th of May and was conducted by the lecturers of Applied Social Psychology programme: Alyona Khaptsova and Olga Poluektova. The seminar’s topic was ‘Methodology of a Field Research: The Cost-Quality Balance’.

On the first day participants got acquainted with the topic of online and offline data collection: platforms for the online data-gathering, advantages and disadvantages of sampling strategies via social networks, and the issue of sensitive items. Also, one of the participants was Arthur Goncharov - Research & Analytics Team Lead of the Mail.ru Group. Arthur told about the current opportunities of conducting online-surveys, putting an emphasis on the behavior monitoring in online-games, and motivation for the participation in the surveys.

The second day began with an online lecture of the Tilburg Professor Fons van de Vijver, who presented the Large-Scale Public Databases; their strong and weak sides in general, and also the examples of particular databases. At the end of the day participants discussed their own projects. It is a great pleasure that this seminar integrated specialists from different fields of science: not only from psychology, but also sociology, philosophy, politics, and even marketing. Participants obtained a new knowledge and shared their experience as well. Students of the Applied Social Psychology Master’s Program: Priestley Yana-Maria and Sergeeva Olga took active participation as well. Summing up, we could say with certainty that the seminar was a success.