Call for Country Experts on Education
Be part of the largest ever data collection project on education policies
Together with the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project at the University of Gothenburg, we would like to invite you to participate in a new DEMED and V-Dem joint project as a Country Expert for the country (or countries) of your expertise.
DEMED and V-Dem will collaborate to measure up to twenty novel indicators of education policies and practices for all countries in the world.
The expert survey will focus on the following topics pertaining to primary and secondary education: centralisation of the curriculum, political education in school, teacher training, monitoring, hiring and firing practices, and teaching styles.
The V-Dem Project (https://www.v-dem.net/en/) leads a unique effort to measure 470+ indicators of democracy for all countries in the world from 1789 to the present. V-Dem hosts one of the largest publicly available databases on democracy with some 28.4 million data points and 182 000 users globally. About half of the V-Dem indicators are based on Country Expert coding. Over 3,500 scholars and other experts from more than 202 countries have contributed.
The V-Dem datasets (https://www.v-dem.net/en/data/reference-material-v11/) have been downloaded over 70,000 times from 167 countries.
Since its inception in 2014, the V-Dem Institute has developed, tested and standardised a world-leading, sophisticated data collection, curation, and aggregation method for expert-coded data. For more details about the V-Dem aggregation methodology, please click here: https://www.v-dem.net/en/our-work/methods/
For our joint DEMED-V-Dem project, we will build a completely new database on education, accumulating the knowledge of hundreds of education experts around the world.
The V-Dem Country Experts generally hold a PhD and are usually residents or citizens of the country they are coding. For more information about the V-Dem definitions of country coding units, Download the Country Coding Units v11.1
We now invite you to be part of this global project and contribute your knowledge.
The online coding will take place between January and February 2022. You will be offered a remuneration of 90 USD as a token of our gratitude.
Click here for expression of interest
DEMED and V-Dem Call for Experts on Education (pdf)
For any questions related to the expert survey, please send an e-mail to demed-project@glasgow.ac.uk.
Related links:
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the main topics you are interested in?
We are interested in formal public or publicly-funded primary and secondary education: that is, in schools that are controlled, managed and funded by the public sector (a relevant national / sub-national / local public authority), as well as schools that are funded or subsidised (not fully funded; for example, receive public subsidies and charge tuition) by the public sector but can be operated by a private body.
The expert survey will focus on the following topics: centralisation of the curriculum, political education in school, teacher training, monitoring, hiring and firing practices, and teaching style.
What happens when?
- June to September, 2021: Recruitment of experts by the DEMED team (via the 'expression of interest' online form)
- September to November, 2021: The DEMED team transfers experts' contact information from the 'expression of interest' form to the V-Dem team. V-Dem contacts experts for online survey.
- January to February, 2023: Online expert survey takes place.
- March 2023: Public release of the final (country-year) dataset.
How will this expert survey look like?
You will be asked to answer questions mainly related to the education system of your country of expertise. For each question, we will ask you to provide a response for each year between 1900 and 2021. You will be also asked to rate how certain you are about each answer.
What years (time periods) will I be asked to submit my answers for?
In our 'expression of interest' online form, we will ask you to provide information about the time period(s) of your expertise.
In the 2022 expert survey, you will have an option to indicate how certain you are in your answers for each question and year, on the scale from 0 (I have no idea at all) to 100% (Absolutely confident). Your confidence levels can be taken into account when ratings are aggregated at the country-year level.
How many countries can I code?
You will be asked to answer questions about one or more countries of your expertise. You can also code more than one country. V-Dem encourages some experts to code more than one country and uses this ”bridge coding” to facilitate cross-country comparability. For more details about the V-Dem aggregation methodology, please click here: https://www.v-dem.net/en/our-work/methods/
Will I get paid for my work?
If selected as a Country Expert, you will be offered a remuneration of 90 USD for completing the 2022 expert survey.
What happens with the data?
Your identity will be kept strictly confidential. This information will not be shared with any external party. The individual ratings experts submit for their assigned country/-ies will be aggregated to produce country-level over-time ratings. For more details about the V-Dem aggregation methodology, please click here: https://www.v-dem.net/en/our-work/methods/
The final (country-year) dataset will be publicly released in 2023. You can download the datasets released by V-Dem here: https://www.v-dem.net/en/data/data/v-dem-dataset-v111/
How will you store and process personally identifiable information?
Your identity will be kept strictly confidential. All Personally identifiable information (PII), that is, name, contact information (email, address, website), title, affiliation, education, biography, etc., is kept on a secure server. Only PII which is necessary will be collected and will only be stored as long as deemed necessary. The information you submit will be shared with the V-Dem Institute team via a secure transfer. Your identity will be only accessible to a limited group within the DEMED and V-Dem teams.
Once your PII is transferred to the V-Dem team, it will be deleted from the DEMED team’s servers. All PII is kept on an encrypted server in Sweden behind several layers of firewall and password protection, separated from the actual ratings you submit at the expert survey stage. The information will not be shared with any external party. Only PII which is necessary will be collected. The ratings you will submit at the expert survey stage will be stored at a different server on a separate system, and will be associated only with a randomly assigned coder ID. Thus, by having access to the ratings, no one will be able identify you as a Country Expert. Due to confidentiality concerns, V-Dem is not allowed to reveal Country Experts identity. This rule is applied to all Country Experts taking part in the V-Dem project, no exceptions can be made.