Factorial Survey Designs in Labor Market Research. An Epilog.

The Workshop “Factorial survey designs in labor market research” took place on 21 May 2015 at the University of Lausanne.

Our four guests, Prof. Katrin Auspurg (Goethe University Frankfurt), Prof. Marc Gurgand (Paris School of Economics), Prof. Dominik Hangartner (London School of Economics) and Andreas Scheck (Goethe University Frankfurt), presented their recent work on survey experiments. Moreover, our three local research teams (Integration through Active Labor Market Policies and Discrimination as an Obstacle to Social Cohesion of the nccr – on the move as well as Education and Employment of the NCCR LIVES) had the possibility to present their planned experimental designs. Besides lively discussions on the different presentations, all research teams obtained valuable feedbacks on their specific projects from both speakers and the audience.

In particular, we discussed pivotal issues such as how to best address low response rates and social desirability biases, how to validate experimental data with behavioral benchmarks and – last but not least – whether conjoint analyses, choice experiments or vignette studies perform best.

The attendance of 25 national and international guests from three different disciplines (sociology, political science and economics) allowed us to network and establish new professional contacts. The discussion benefitted a lot from the researchers’ interdisciplinarity, which opened new perspectives on the various questions.

Flavia Fossati, nccr – on the move, PostDoc on the project Integration through Active Labor Market Policies