Dicuss Data Blog
Blog Post
DiscussDataLab Workshop Report: Challenges of Data Collection, Re-use, and Analysis
Friedrich Leis, University of Bremen
From 25 to 27 August 2025, the first DiscussDataLab, organized by the Discuss Data project, brought together a dozen early career researchers working on Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia with renowned experts in data collection, processing and visualisation. Discuss Data is a collaboration between the Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen and the State and University Library, Göttingen, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), (https://discuss-data.net). The event took place at the Research Centre for East European Studies (FSO) at the University of Bremen (Germany). The three-day workshop, titled “Challenges of Data Collection, Re-use, and Analysis: Public Opinion, Political Debates, and Protests in the Context of the Russo-Ukrainian War”, aimed to create a room for learning and exchange for scholars with a thematic focus on migration, social media, and protest data.
Blog Post
Coverage or Candour? Survey-Mode Trade-offs for Studying Wartime Ukraine
Aaron Erlich (McGill University)
Russia’s full-scale invasion has created enormous demand for survey data on what Ukrainians think and do. Yet, the choice of survey mode quietly shapes the answers. Drawing on two surveys fielded simultaneously in the summer of 2022, I show that telephone and web surveys each carry a distinct bias. Choosing between them means deciding which kind of error a study can better tolerate.
Blog Post
Reflections on Data Collection in Ukraine Amidst Russia’s War
Marnie Howlett (University of Oxford)
Even under ideal conditions, collecting empirical data is often challenging. Designing a rigorous empirical research project involves the navigation of numerous methodological and ethical considerations alongside practical constraints such as time, funding, and access to participants and field sites. These challenges intensify in conflict settings, where dangerous, volatile environments shape how and what data can be collected, inform the ways they are interpreted, and ultimately, complicate efforts to maintain research integrity. Scholars must consequently often adapt their methods in real time while upholding ethical standards, protecting participants and themselves, and ensuring data validity and reliability.
In this short piece, I illustrate how these challenges have emerged in practice during my experiences conducting nearly 200 online interviews and running six public opinion and conjoint survey experiments in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Although the obstacles I encountered are shaped by my specific discipline (political science), topics, methods, timings, and field context, they reflect broader difficulties in studying conflict-affected societies, and offer guidance for producing ethical, transparent, and decolonial knowledge in such settings – both in Ukraine and elsewhere.
Blog Post
The Data Transparency Problem: How Ukrainian Media Cover Opinion Polls
Valentyn Hatsko, Dmytro Andreiev (both Kyiv School of Economics)
Ukrainians regularly encounter opinion polls in the media, e.g. on governmental trust, negotiations, or corruption. Yet they rarely explain how these surveys are conducted. An analysis of more than 15,000 news items shows that polling results are widely reported, while methodological information is largely omitted.
Blog Post
Digital Forensic Process Tracing in the Age of AI: Challenges and Opportunities
Jakob Hauter (University of Reading)
The increasing power and popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) has created new challenges for social scientists who work with data from online sources. In this blog post, I explain how researchers can respond to this challenge by using the social science method of process tracing for the qualitative analysis of online data.