Geographical and georeferenced data are gaining increasing importance in social science research. For example, it is becoming more common to add geographical data related to the social or physical environment as contextual variables to social surveys or to aggregate social survey results at various geographical scales. Using geographical data in our research necessitates additional analytical skills and workflows, usually related to some sort of Geographical Information System (GIS). GIS can be defined as a collection of tools to process, analyze and visualize data containing spatial information; such tools have been developed as “packages” for statistical software R or for the programming language Python, but these require intermediate to advanced coding skills. On the other hand, there are also GIS software solutions by various corporations which may be unaffordable for certain contexts, such as independent researchers of non-governmental organisations.

For this workshop, we were using the free and open source software QGIS, which is widely available and fully maintained by a strong community of volunteers and supporting organisations. In addition to the main QGIS software, there is a wide range of training material produced by the QGIS community and many educational and research institutes.

In this workshop, participants learned how to use QGIS for basic data processing and introductory spatial analysis. They also learned about common GIS formats, importing data, processing them for further analysis and mapping their results.