Presentation

Overview

The Summer School “Quantification, Gender and Sexuality” is a training programme in statistical data analysis aimed at PhD candidates and Master’s students whose research focuses on gender and/or sexuality. It aims to introduce participants to the R software while offering a space for reflection on quantitative approaches in the social sciences.

No prior requirements are expected. The programme is primarily intended for participants with little or no experience in statistical analysis who wish to use quantitative data in their PhD thesis or Master’s dissertation. It is open to all disciplines within the social sciences.

The summer school is jointly organised by Equipex+ LifeObs (the French Observatory of Life Courses) and EUR GSST (European Graduate School for Gender and Sexuality Studies, EHESS / INED), and is associated with the Envie survey (Survey on the Affective Life of Young Adults, INED).

Two complementary components

Practical component. The first component consists of an intensive two-day training course on the R software. The aim is to provide participants with the basic skills needed to master the software and to carry out simple statistical analyses independently. This training is based on a teaching kit developed from the Envie survey, a questionnaire-based study conducted in 2023 and devoted to the intimate relationships of young adults (Bergström et al., 2025).

By working with data directly related to issues of gender and sexuality, the summer school also provides an opportunity to become familiar with a major recent quantitative survey.

Thematic component. While the practical component relies primarily on the Envie survey as a training resource, the thematic component draws on a broader range of studies, surveys and research in gender and sexuality studies, in order to situate quantitative tools within a wider theoretical and methodological perspective.

It is structured around several keynote lectures offering reflections on the quantitative operationalisation of concepts and approaches used in gender and sexuality studies (social relations, intersectionality, minoritisation, sexual scripts, etc.). These lectures provide reflexive spaces on quantitative methods: their contributions, their specificities and their limits, as well as their complementarity with qualitative methods.

A session is also dedicated to participants’ own research projects, in order to support each participant in choosing appropriate methods and data.

Open science

The summer school is part of an open science approach. Within the training component, participants work on a pedagogical version of the Envie survey, designed for learning data analysis using R, and accompanied by comprehensive documentation (questionnaire, variable dictionary, codebook) as well as reproducible scripts.

The full research datasets from the Envie survey will subsequently be made available to the scientific community via the Quetelet-Progedo platform, in accordance with the data dissemination policies of Ined and LifeObs.