The Methods Center

The Methods Center is an institute at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. Its objective is to support a broad methodological discourse and essentially fulfills four functions:

The Methods Center primarily promotes methodological basic research (method development) and serves as a platform for interdisciplinary cooperation and exchange in this field. It is intended to provide a forum for research in quantitative and qualitative methods as well as for methodological reflection in the philosophy of science. Part of this mission is to create an interdisciplinary, multi-method discourse space in which the potentials and limitations of different approaches are addressed, and in which methodological development is enriched by the tensions that arise both within individual disciplines and across them.

We work at the intersection of Psychometrics and Machine Learning, especially in forecasting of longitudinal phenomena and causality, but also validity of personality measures of LLMs. We provide developments of software with societal impact, for example, for real-time prediction of dropouts in STEM subjects (front ends, back ends) which is freely available on GitHub for universities (on behalf of the state of Baden-Württemberg).

Current developments in our research can be found here.

The Methods Center fulfills a bridging function by engaging with the research structures of the University of Tübingen. This includes, in particular, involvement in research projects that require methodological development in the social and behavioral sciences.

A list of current and completed research projects can be found here.

The Methods Center is advancing the development of interdisciplinary methodological teaching. 

In 2020, we founded the interdisciplinary and international Masters' program "Quantitative Data Science Methods: Psychometrics, Econometrics and Machine Learning" which teaches students expertise in state-of-the-art methods from broad range of areas. The according and further lectures can be found here.

The Methods Center organizes yearly Fall Schools and Spring Schools which includes an interdisciplinary program of workshops including quantitative methods, machine learning and qualitative methods. 

The Methods Center assumes the task of explicitly providing methodological expertise, for example by serving as a point of consultation for the planning and analysis of empirical studies. Its consulting function ranges from individual cases (e.g., DFG research grants, BMBF projects) to involvement in the planning and implementation of large-scale research projects. We provide RDM services such as archiving more than 40 online student self-assessment platforms throughout Baden-Württemberg. We deploy forecasting services with heterogeneous longitudinal multimodal data of human behavior. Details can be found here.

Since mid 2020, the Methods Center of the University of Tübingen has received, in addition to its basic funding, support as a so-called Core Facility of the University of Tübingen within the framework of the Excellence Universities (ExU) funding program.