Elisabeth Ivarsflaten is the principal investigator of the Digital Social Science Core Facility.  DIGSSCORE is an infrastructure for digital social science data collection at the University of Bergen, an advanced facility for digital social science and multi-disciplinary research. It extends and professionalises the successful internet-panel which was established at the University of Bergen in 2013, The Norwegian Citizen Panel (Norsk medborgerpanel), and adds a fully equipped on-site social science digital research lab, the Citizen Lab (Medborgerlaben).

Since its establishment in 2016, more than 60 affiliated researchers from five different faculties at the University of Bergen have benefited from the DIGSSCORE facilities, and also institutions outside of UiB, particularly NORCE, uses DIGSSCORE to collect data on opinion and attitudes in Norway. Data are also accessible to use for all research and education purposes at Norwegian Center for Research data (NSD).

The Norwegian Citizen Panel

The Norwegian Citizen Panel is a representative research-purpose internet panel with over 10 000 active participants. The Norwegian Citizen Panel was established as a collaboration between several departments at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Bergen, and NORCE.

The Citizen Panel is based on a probability sample of the general Norwegian population above the age of 18 drawn from the Norwegian National Registry. The first panel wave and recruitment wave was in autumn 2013. There has been six recruitment waves so far, and supplementary recruiting is done on a yearly basis. Panel members complete an online questionnaire three times a year of 15 minutes each, and 16 waves of data collection has been finished so far (January 2020).

For more information on the Norwegian Citizen Panel, visit the web pages for DIGSSCORE (English) or for the Norwegian Citizen Panel (Norwegian). Here you will also find information on how to propose questions to, or use data from the Norwegian Citizen Panel.

The Citizen lab

The Citizen Lab is the other pillar of DIGSSCORE, a fully equipped research lab for the social sciences. In the Citizen Lab, researchers can do computer experiments with 32 participants per session. The lab is equipped with computers and headsets, and licenses for key software needed by several different fields using the Citizen Lab. In addition, the lab acquires more hardware and software when needed by users.

To recruit participants for experiments in an efficient way, the Citizen Lab includes a participant pool, that now consists of about 2000 members,
mostly students at the University of Bergen. This lowers the threshold for running an experiment, as recruitment to experiments is simpler with this participant pool. The Citizen Lab has been used for experiments by researchers based at UiB, NORCE and NHH, in addition to several master students at the University of Bergen. The physical Citizen Lab is also a good facility for teaching computer based courses.

For more information on the Citizen Lab, visit the DIGSSCORE web page.

Elisabeth Ivarsflaten
Department of Government
Digital Social Science Core Facility
University of Bergen
Rosenbersgate 35, 5015 Bergen

email: elisabeth.ivarsflaten@uib.no
url: ivarsflaten.w.uib.no
phone: +47 55 58 24 60
mobile: +47 45 67 16 63
post: Postboks 7802, 5020 Bergen