“Every August since 2012, the GESIS Summer School in Survey Methodology takes place at GESIS, Cologne. Lecturers and participants from all over the world and from many different fields come to Cologne to take part in Europe's leading summer school on survey methodology, research design, and data collection.”

(Source: https://www.gesis.org/angebot/veranstaltungen/gesis-training/summer-school)

Due to this year’s difficult circumstances, the yearly GESIS School in Survey Methodology by the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences was held virtually for the first time. The GSGS Travel Grant therefor was slightly misused from its original purposes as no actual travelling was involved. However, the participation in the course “Introduction to R for Data Analysis” allowed me to get valuable first insights on how to program with R and analyse statistical data with the open source software R-Studio. This course was of special interest to me as I give seminars on applied data analysis using the costly software STATA (this semester also for the first time virtually) but hope to be able to shift this seminar as well as my own data analysis to R on the long run. Besides the technical input on the use and possibilities of R, I experienced how it feels like to sit at the other side of the computer, being flooded with new information and complicated codes – which was at some points overwhelming and slightly too much. Surely, some positive examples from my R lecturers will be useful for my own teaching practices. But it also encouraged me to stick to my rather slow and focused style of lecturing coupled with many exercises and group work in breakout sessions. Nonetheless, I learned a lot about the scope of possibilities R has to offer and will surely keep on practicing my R programming skills to make use of the exciting software in the future.

Carolin Hulke

PhD student
Institute of Geography
Working group Economic Geography and the Global South
PhD project: “Local Value Chains, Global Production Networks and Agricultural Growth Corridors – Non-participation as a livelihood strategy of agricultural communities in Namibia”
Associated to the CRC/TR228 Future Rural Africa