Research
Data play an important role in knowledge creation and decision-making. Our department focuses on how to make sense of data by studying three themes:
- How we can obtain high quality data? This includes survey methodology and official statistics such as in our collaborations with Statistics Netherlands (CBS);
- Processing and doing statistical modelling so that the data can be used to answer specific questions. This area includes a large variety of data analysis techniques for observed and/or latent variables, Bayesian methods, longitudinal data, dealing with missing data, and research synthesis techniques.
- Applied Data Science/Artificial Intelligence. Data are nowadays generated at an ever-increasing speed and volume. This requires new ways to wrangle, manipulate and analyze large amounts of multimodal new forms of data that have become a crucial part of our society and research. This area includes natural language and text processing, computational approaches for social and behavioral sciences, as well as the analysis of missing data.
The department actively participates in the University-wide strategic theme Dynamics of Youth and the focus area Applied Data Science. In almost all our projects we collaborate with societal partners who collect data or want to answer questions by using complex data.
More information about these projects can be found through the nine focus areas that we are working on. Around 40 researchers work at the department. More information about the organisation of the department and its employees can be found on the employee page.
