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Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons™
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- Questionnaire design (2)
- Telephone surveys (2)
- Administrative records (1)
- Battery items (1)
- Data collection (1)
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- Data quality (1)
- Disclosure avoidance (1)
- Interviewer-respondent interaction (1)
- Interviewer–respondent interaction (1)
- Mail survey (1)
- Mismatches (1)
- Question features (1)
- Question wording (1)
- Ranking (1)
- Respondent behaviors (1)
- Response time (1)
- Statistical modeling (1)
- Survey methods (1)
- Survey research (1)
- Survey statistics (1)
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Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies
Why Do Cell Phone Interviews Last Longer? A Behavior Coding Perspective, Jerry Timbrook, Kristen Olson, Jolene Smyth
Why Do Cell Phone Interviews Last Longer? A Behavior Coding Perspective, Jerry Timbrook, Kristen Olson, Jolene Smyth
Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications
Why do telephone interviews last longer on cell phones than landline phones? Common explanations for this phenomenon include differential selection into subsets of questions, activities outside the question-answer sequence (such as collecting contact information for cell-minute reimbursement), respondent characteristics, behaviors indicating disruption to respondents’ perception and comprehension, and behaviors indicating interviewer reactions to disruption. We find that the time difference persists even when we focus only on the question-answer portion of the interview and only on shared questions (i.e., eliminating the first two explanations above). To learn why the difference persists, we use behavior codes from the U.S./Japan Newspaper Opinion …
Comparing Survey Ranking Question Formats In Mail Surveys, Jolene Smyth, Kristen Olson, Allison Burke
Comparing Survey Ranking Question Formats In Mail Surveys, Jolene Smyth, Kristen Olson, Allison Burke
Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications
Although questions that ask respondents to rank-order a list of items can be analytically valuable, responding to ranking questions typically requires a good deal of cognitive effort. This is especially true in mail questionnaires where the advantages of electronic response formats available in web surveys are inaccessible. In this article, we examine two alternative formats for ranking questions in mail surveys. Using a nationally representative mail survey of U.S. adults, this article experimentally compares ranking formats in which respondents write numbers in boxes versus selecting items for the most and second most important issues using a grid layout. Respondents to …
Effects Of A Government-Academic Partnership: Has The Nsf-Census Bureau Research Network Helped Improve The U.S. Statistical System?, Daniel H. Weinberg,, John M. Abowd, Robert F. Belli, Noel Cressie, David C. Folch, S. H. Holan, Margaret C. Levenstein, Kristen Olson, Jerome P. Reiter, Matthew D. Shapiro, Jolene Smyth, Leen-Kiat Soh, Bruce D. Spencer, Seth E. Spielman, Lars Vilhuber, Christopher K. Wikle
Effects Of A Government-Academic Partnership: Has The Nsf-Census Bureau Research Network Helped Improve The U.S. Statistical System?, Daniel H. Weinberg,, John M. Abowd, Robert F. Belli, Noel Cressie, David C. Folch, S. H. Holan, Margaret C. Levenstein, Kristen Olson, Jerome P. Reiter, Matthew D. Shapiro, Jolene Smyth, Leen-Kiat Soh, Bruce D. Spencer, Seth E. Spielman, Lars Vilhuber, Christopher K. Wikle
Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications
The National Science Foundation-Census Bureau Research Network (NCRN) was established in 2011 to create interdisciplinary research nodes on methodological questions of interest and significance to the broader research community and to the Federal Statistical System (FSS), particularly to the Census Bureau. The activities to date have covered both fundamental and applied statistical research and have focused at least in part on the training of current and future generations of researchers in skills of relevance to surveys and alternative measurement of economic units, households, and persons. This article focuses on some of the key research findings of the eight nodes, organized …
The Effects Of Respondent And Question Characteristics On Respondent Answering Behaviors In Telephone Interviews, Kristen Olson, Jolene Smyth, Amanda Ganshert
The Effects Of Respondent And Question Characteristics On Respondent Answering Behaviors In Telephone Interviews, Kristen Olson, Jolene Smyth, Amanda Ganshert
Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications
In a standardized telephone interview, respondents ideally are able to provide an answer that easily fits the response task. Deviations from this ideal question answering behavior are behavioral manifestations of breakdowns in the cognitive response process and partially reveal mechanisms underlying measurement error, but little is known about what question characteristics or types of respondents are associated with what types of deviations. Evaluations of question problems tend to look at one question characteristic at a time; yet questions are comprised of multiple characteristics, some of which are easier to experimentally manipulate (e.g., presence of a definition) than others (e.g., attitude …
Item Location, The Interviewer–Respondent Interaction, And Responses To Battery Questions In Telephone Surveys, Kristen Olson, Jolene Smyth, Beth Cochran
Item Location, The Interviewer–Respondent Interaction, And Responses To Battery Questions In Telephone Surveys, Kristen Olson, Jolene Smyth, Beth Cochran
Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications
Survey researchers often ask a series of attitudinal questions with a common question stem and response options, known as battery questions. Interviewers have substantial latitude in deciding how to administer these items, including whether to reread the common question stem on items after the first one or to probe respondents’ answers. Despite the ubiquity of use of these items, there is virtually no research on whether respondent and interviewer behaviors on battery questions differ over items in a battery or whether interview behaviors are associated with answers to these questions. This article uses a nationally representative telephone survey with audio-recorded …
The Effects Of Mismatches Between Survey Question Stems And Response Options On Data Quality And Responses, Jolene Smyth, Kristen Olson
The Effects Of Mismatches Between Survey Question Stems And Response Options On Data Quality And Responses, Jolene Smyth, Kristen Olson
Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications
Several questionnaire design texts emphasize a dual role of question wording: the wording needs to express what is being measured and tell respondents how to answer. Researchers tend to focus heavily on the first of these goals, but sometimes overlook the second, resulting in question wording that does not match the response options provided (i.e., mismatches). Common examples are yes/no questions with ordinal or nominal response options, open-ended questions with closed-ended response options, and check-all-that apply questions with forced-choice response options. A slightly different type of mismatch utilizes a question stem that can be read as asking for two different …