SHORT COURSE: Innovative Methods for Survey Weighting

*includes a 30 minute break* Learn more and register: https://ssri.duke.edu/talk-when-are-polling-differences-true-public-opinion-change/ This workshop will cover the foundations of survey weighting together with several modern, data-driven techniques. We'll begin with survey sampling designs and design-based inference, including Horvitz-Thompson and Hájek estimators and the design weights that underlie them. We then examine survey nonresponse, coverage error, and nonprobability samples, along with standard approaches including inverse propensity weighting, post-stratification, linear weighting (GREG), and raking. The workshop also covers practical considerations such as how weighting affects precision, what to weight on, when to trim, and how to assess balance. The workshop also focuses on advanced weighting techniques, including multilevel calibration weighting and kernel population weighting. These data-driven approaches reduce researcher degrees of freedom and relax functional-form assumptions. Throughout, participants get hands-on experience through analytical and code-based worksheets in R.