Dear Colleagues,

the deadline for abstract submission is approaching (January 13).  Please consider submitting an abstract for our session at ESRA 2013 

*Natural Experiments in Survey Research*

Experiments are generally regarded as the royal road to causal inference. Yet, social science research often cannot make use of research designs based on randomized laboratory experiments. This is, in part, due to the very nature of social inquiry, which generally is concerned with society. Consequently, critics blame the (alleged) low external validity of lab experiments in the social sciences. Natural experiments can help to reduce these problems as they are set in a real societal context, and external validity can be enhanced. They do, however, face serious problems as well: endogeneity, insufficiencies in standardizing treatment- and control conditions, and self-selection into study- and control group. Advances in data analysis have tackled these problems, and methods such as IV-regression, conditional fixed-effects models and propensity score matching help in identifying unbiased treatment effects.

In this session we are particularly interested in papers on identification of treatment effects in natural experiments, research combining surveys with natural-experimental designs, papers that employ multiple methods of treatment estimation, and innovative ways to design or analyze natural experiments in cross-sectional and especially panel surveys.
***

For submitting an abstract, please log onto the ESRA website, http://www.europeansurveyresearch.org/conferences/register. The deadline for abstract submission is January 13, 2013. During the submission process, you will be asked to select the area of survey methodology to which your presentation belongs. Here, please select "Survey mode" and then the title of this session: "Natural Experiments in Survey Research".


Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries about the session.
Thank you very much and best regards

Henning Best, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim, Germany, henning.best@gesis.org
Gerrit Bauer, LMU Munich, Germany, gerrit.bauer@soziologie.uni-muenchen.de