On Friday, 12th October 2018, interested people and researchers from various social science disciplines met at the Skylounge of the University of Vienna not only to enjoy the view and the good food, but primarily to attend the presentations of the results of the PUMA-project.
At the beginning, PUMA director Univ.-Prof. Dr. Sylvia Kritzinger and Matthias Reiter-Pázmándy, who represented the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF), gave the opening speeches. After that, journalist and author Ingrid Brodnig and Univ.-Prof. Dr. Sonja Puntscher Riekmann presented the keynote presentations on the topic "Forschung und Fake News!? Die Bedeutung von Sozialforschung und empirischen Daten für Gesellschaft, Politik und Medien" (Research and Fake News!? The Importance of Social Research and Empirical Data for Society, Politics and the Media). The talk was on the responsibility of the research community towards society, but also about the communication problems between science and popular media. Afterwards, researchers presented the results of their survey studies in 16 interesting short lectures on work motivation and working conditions, well-being and work-life balance, immigration and the welfare state, health and old age, elections, political parties and candidates, the tax system and knowledge about taxes, politics and the media, authoritarianism and populism.
Data available at AUSSDA
This symposium was particularly important for AUSSDA, as most of the PUMA data records presented are archived and made available for scientific use by AUSSDA (https://data.aussda.at/dataverse/puma). Also, the AUSSDA team was excited to see the well known data brought to life.
What is PUMA?
PUMA is a cooperation of the Universities of Vienna, Linz, Salzburg, Klagenfurt, Innsbruck and Graz, Statistics Austria as well as the associated partner organizations Austrian Academy of Sciences and MODUL University. It is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research from 2014-2018. The aim of PUMA is to strengthen the Austrian empirical social sciences, especially in the field of survey research, through methodological strengthening and further development, the joint definition of innovative and socially relevant research questions and the data generation by Statistics Austria. In 2018, PUMA offers some more exciting method workshops.
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