Area A

Data and Methods

The projects in area A will develop innovative methods for studying resilience in times of crises regarding data-generation and -combination and for policy evaluation. To properly measure the well-being, perceptions, beliefs, and actions of societal actors in times of crises, more precise/fine-grained data needs to be generated and analyzed in faster and more effective ways. The focus of area A projects will be on

• combining existing survey infrastructures with novel data sources using digital traces from smartphones, wearables, and other devices with sensors. Large, high-frequency data sets might be combined with survey data collected in only some geographical areas or for selected groups.
• using textual resources to track public crisis discourse in mainstream and social media, analyze crisis-related policy making by looking at party programs, political speeches and legal texts, and study the economic impact of crises through press releases or social media data.
• novel instruments for policy evaluation, that is, developing and applying econometric methods to evaluate policies in times of crises, for example by making use of the latest developments in machine learning.

These new instruments will be developed and adjusted in ongoing interaction with the substantive projects in areas B, C, and D. This interaction will help these projects to operate at the research frontier and to move it forward.

Area BArea CArea D