Course description

Paradata (also called process data) are the data automatically generated when respondents answer Web surveys. There are many different kinds of Web survey paradata, including email tracking tools, user agent strings (to identify devices used), and server-side and client-side paradata providing information on things like response times, mouse-clicks, scrolling behavior, and so on. Paradata are often unstructured and messy.  This course will provide an overview of the different types of Web paradata, and how they can be collected, managed, and analyzed to provide useful information on data quality and nonresponse in Web surveys. The course will not focus on particular survey or analytic software, but will focus more generally no the kinds of information that can be extracted, and how the paradata can be used to understand respondent behavior in web surveys.