Population Research Discovery Seminars
Partnering with a Global Platform to inform Research and Public Policy-making: What needs to be in place to make a Global COVID-19 Survey work?
Frauke Kreuter, PhD
Professor, Statistics and Data Science, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich
Professor, Joint Program in Survey Methodology & Co-director, Social Data Science Center, University of Maryland
Moderated by:
Zack Almquist, Assistant Professor, UW Department of Sociology
Register for Zoom Seminar HERE
04/02/2021
12:30-1:30 PM PT
This presentation describes a partnership between Facebook and academic institutions to create a global COVID-19 symptom survey. The survey is available in 56 languages. A representative sample of Facebook users is invited on a daily basis to report on symptoms, social distancing behavior, mental health issues, and financial constraints. Facebook provides weights to reduce nonresponse and coverage bias. Privacy protection and disclosure avoidance mechanisms are implemented by both partners to meet global policy and industry requirements. Country and region-level statistics are published daily via dashboards, and microdata are available for researchers via data use agreements. Over 1 million responses are collected weekly. We will discuss problems such partnerships face, skills needed for such large survey data collections, as well as early results from the new vaccine module.
Frauke Kreuter is Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (Germany) and co-director of Data Science Centers at the University of Maryland (USA) and Mannheim (Germany). In addition to her academic work Dr. Kreuter is the Founder of the International Program for Survey and Data Science, developed in response to the increasing demand from researchers and practitioners for the appropriate methods and right tools to face a changing data environment; Co-Founder of the Coleridge Initiative, whose goal is to accelerate data-driven research and policy around human beings and their interactions for program management, policy development, and scholarly purposes by enabling efficient, effective, and secure access to sensitive data about society and the economy; and Co-Founder of the German language podcast Dig Deep.