Our mission
Welcome to
InFER, welcome to our homepage!
The
Institute for Empirical-Analytical Research (InFER) is a leading social science
institute based at Goethe University Frankfurt. Our mission is to provide a
research hub for cutting-edge empirical analytical research in political
science and sociology. InFER is one of the largest institutes of its kind,
including more than 60 researchers: professors, postdocs, and PhD researchers.
Our
researchers analyze relevant social and political phenomena with sophisticated
research designs and state-of-the-art data analysis techniques, striving to
advance a better and empirically sound understanding of society and politics.
Substantively, we cover a broad range of topics and expertise, including for
example processes of social change, causes and consequences of inequality,
political preferences and behavior, party politics, organizational studies,
political conflict, education, and labor markets. A list of ongoing research
projects associated with InFER can be found here.
Our
researchers conduct excellent research both individually as well as in collective
research projects. This shows not only in our published work but also in a
range of third-party funded projects, including several ERC grants, multiple
projects funded by the DFG (German research foundation), as well as collective
research grants, most recently a large DFG-funded research group on the
Reconfiguration and Internalization of Social Structure (RISS).
InFER runs
a bi-weekly colloquium, the InFER Colloquium, at which faculty, postdocs, and
external speakers present their ongoing research. We also host the Comparative
Politics Speaker Series, a flagship series bringing worldclass scholars to
Frankfurt, connected with our Master program in Comparative Democracy and our
Doctoral Colloquium in Comparative Politics. In addition, we host an InFER colloquium
for graduate students and postdocs to present their work. We take pride in
offering a range of opportunities for our early career scholars, for example
frequent workshops in research designs or specific cutting-edge methods (e.g.
on causal inference, causal graphs, specific methods) as well as regular
hands-on exchange on research practices and career development.
Our
researchers provide research methods training and applied research seminars in
the BA and MA programs of the Faculty of Social Sciences (FB03) and the
associated graduate programs. We are interested in, and employ, a range of
methods in our work, including longitudinal models for causal inference with
observational data, multilevel models, different kinds of experiments, text
mining and supervised machine learning, QCA, and other configurative
comparative methods, Bayesian inference, and data visualization. Most of our
research is comparative, including cross-national and cross-regional designs as
well as over-time comparisons, allowing us to link macro-, meso-, and
micro-level phenomena to study complex social phenomena.
