Survey Practice June 2010
This issue of Survey Practice contains an interesting mix of research articles that cover areas that survey researchers often think about. For some topics, the previous literature is not necessarily helpful for practitioners and for others, little or no research exists.
In the article by Tim Johnson and colleagues, they demonstrate that cultural contexts can influence response rates, another factor we have to consider when tailoring efforts to reduce non-response.
The second article by Keith Smith and colleagues shows that many young children are not able to accurately report their race in response to survey questions and multiple respondents reporting the race of a child do not always agree. The authors make a suggestion for asking children about their race and ethnic identity.
Kevin Wang reports on research about changing the format of the income question from a single item to an unfolding format. The Conclusion section in his article has some interesting thoughts about the effect of the question format on income distributions.
Brian Clarridge and colleagues used modified telephone survey interviewing procedures to gather information on adverse medical events. Three types of cognitive probes help patients accurately report the events.
More on telephone survey samples: Paul Johnson and Dan Williams compared RDD and ABS samples hoping to understand the value of ABS for locating and interviewing some hard-to-find populations. They also compared costs with each sample. Mansour Fahimi and David Malarek comment on the Barron et al. article on the impact of 0-Banks in landline RDD samples that appeared in the April issue of Survey Practice.
As always, please send your articles appropriate for Survey Practice and we welcome more presentations from the recent AAPOR conference.
The Editors
- John Kennedy
- Diane O’Rourke
- David Moore
- Andy Peytchev