Welcome to my website.
I’m a Research Fellow in Survey Methodology at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the Universiy of Mannheim.
I’m also a Research Associate at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex and serve as Vice President of the European Survey Research Association (ESRA) in 2023-2025.
In my research, I investigate the quality of novel methods of data collection in the social sciences, with the aim of identifying and reducing potential error sources in the data. My current research interests focus on mobile web surveys, smartphone apps, wearable sensors, and digital behavioral data.
Ph.D. Survey Methodology, 2018
University of Essex
B.A. Politics and Public Administration, 2014
University of Konstanz
See CV for complete list of publications
Funded by the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung, 2023-2026 The rising spread of smartphones in the general population offers empirical social research new opportunities for collecting data about attitudes and behaviours. Smartphones allow administering surveys and, at the same time, collecting detailed behavioural data through the smartphone’s built-in sensors. However, a major challenge of smartphone-based data collection is the low willingness of the population to participate. Selective participation by certain subgroups of the population can lead to biased results.
This project aims to develop and test a theoretical framework of the social acceptance of smartphones as a data collection tool in empirical social research. The aim is to improve the representativeness of smartphone-based studies. The main questions are which social psychological factors explain the willingness to participate and which measures can be used to increase this willingness. The theoretical framework will be developed based on a systematic review of technology acceptance theories as well as qualitative in-depth interviews with smartphone users and tested as part of a smartphone data collection.