Survey Practice December 2010

This issue of Survey Practice has a mixture of articles on a number of topics including two articles on telephone survey sampling procedures, an article on questionnaire design and the challenges of mobile devices, and two articles on multi-mode that we were not able to include in the special issue on mixed- and multi-mode methods.

Articles:

The articles on RDD sampling challenges, address-based sampling, and cell phone samples tend to be among the most read articles in Survey Practice. In this month’s issue, John Boyle and his colleagues researched the different outcomes from overlapping and segmented designs when using mixed cell and landline RDD samples. They found that the overlapping design more closely matched the population characteristics.

A second article on telephone samples looks at the accuracy of matching telephone numbers to address based samples. Ashley Amaya and her colleagues found that defining a “match” was a challenge and that the outcome of the matching process depends on the definition of a match.

SP has not published many articles on Internet survey display. Two earlier articles on accessibility were among the articles read most often but the article on using paradata to evaluate browser space by Mario Callegaro in the issue is the first we have published on the potential impact of displays on data quality. The editors encourage more articles on Internet survey design.

Survey researchers often use vague terms such as “usual” in their questions. Most often, the respondents are allowed to interpret these vague terms for themselves. Jennifer Edgar reports on research that reports on how respondents interpret “usual” when asked about household expenses.

The article by Edith deLeeuw is very unusual for SP – it has no tables or data analysis. However, the article has some interesting information on mixed-mode surveys, describes well the data equivalence problem, and provides some good resources.

Similar to the data equivalence problem is the problem of processing data from multi-mode surveys. Erin Foster and her colleagues describe the challenges to processing data collected in three modes – telephone, mail, and in-person interviews.

As always, we welcome your comments on Survey Practice.

The Editors

  • John Kennedy
  • Andy Peytchev
  • David Moore
  • Diane O’Rourke