Blanka Szeitl*
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Received Sylff fellowship in 2023
Current affiliation: researcher
Blanka Szeitl graduated in 2015 with a master's degree in Survey Statistics from the Faculty of Social Sciences of ELTE. She obtained her PhD in Applied Mathematics in 2024 at University of Szeged. Her research topics are the development of stochastic survey sampling techniques and the investigation of new quantitative methodological directions. In addition, she is working on the analysis of data collection biases that may arise from non-response and new data collection platforms. She is involved in projects related to the European Social Survey (ESS) at the Centre for Social Sciences (HUN-REN) and assistant lecturer at the Department of Statistics at the Faculty of Social Sciences of ELTE.
Summary of Support Program Activities
Survey research has a central role in empirical social research. The methods of data collection and their accuracy have been greatly influenced by technological developments and changes in the social environment in recent decades. Empirical social research draws conclusions by analyzing objective data, so the reliability and accuracy of the data are crucial. The objective of the research is to describe the Hungarian survey interviewer network regarding its impact on sample composition and data quality. Studying a country's survey interviewer network is crucial for enhancing data quality, reducing biases, and ensuring the reliability and validity of survey results. It aids in improving operational efficiency, tailoring survey methods to cultural contexts, and developing innovative survey techniques.
The five specific research questions are:
How to describe the network of interviewers conducting survey data collections in Hungary?
How has it changed due to the COVID virus?
What are its local characteristics and what are the features that could be valid for other European countries?
What are its current major problems, with a particular focus on those that may have an impact on the willingness to respond and on data quality?
What are the benefits that could be worth implementing in new methods that have emerged because of technological progress?
The data collection involves conducting semi-structured qualitative interviews with fieldwork professionals. The objective is to identify biases in estimates from survey research that may be due to human factors from the field, and to find the optimum trade-off between the introduction of new techniques and the improvement of the current state of survey interviewers’ network for empirical social sciences.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blankaszeitl/
