School-based surveys of adolescents can be logistically difficult and exclude students who do not attend school. Social media recruitment could be a promising strategy to recruit representative samples of adolescents. However, few studies have compared adolescent survey data collected via different methodologies. Our team was conducting a…

In sample designs, it is commonly recognized that using auxiliary information significantly increases an estimator's precision. This manuscript introduces an weighted strategy for computing the finite population mean using auxiliary information in sample surveys. The equations for the mean squared error ("MSE") of the proposed estimator…

Insufficient wages and unequal pay create challenges in attracting and retaining high-quality early educators, critical for young children's success in early care and education (ECE) programs. While ECE professional wages are already lower than similar workers, there may be wage disparities based on race/ethnicity and gender within the workforce.…

Background: Digital games are increasingly used as tools for civic and societal engagement, particularly to reach younger and digitally literate publics on complex issues such as climate change. While such approaches can facilitate large-scale participation and raise awareness, their capacity to support deliberative forms of civic engagement…

Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are now a popular tool to inform causal inferences. We discuss how DAGs can also be used to encode theoretical assumptions about nonprobability samples and survey nonresponse and to determine whether population quantities including conditional distributions and regressions can be identified. We describe sources of…

The objective of our project was to develop a smartphone app for administering shorter ("modular") surveys. Given the paucity of research on this topic, we decided to use "co-design" techniques to generate design solutions. To implement these techniques, we recruited respondents in the survey target population to work in small…

A number of previous studies have shown that the direction of rating scales may affect the distribution of responses. There is also considerable evidence that the cognitive process of answering a survey question differ by survey mode, which suggests that scale direction effects may interact with mode effects. The aim of this study was to explore…

Intergenerational educational mobility reflects a welfare state's ability to provide citizens with opportunities to climb the social ladder. Representing two distinct welfare state types, studies have contrasted mobility patterns in Scandinavia and the United States but have provided no consistent answer as to who achieves the highest level of…

Many evaluations of human services programs rely heavily on survey follow-up to collect outcome data from randomized controlled trials. Evidence clearinghouses will give their highest grade of evidence quality to such evaluations if attrition is low. Declining survey response rates, particularly in the control group, are making it more difficult…

A group of U.S. school speech-language pathologists (SLPs; N = 233), via survey, provided the following business-as-usual (BAU) augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) practices: (a) service delivery models, (b) treatment intensity, (c) the number of aided models provided, and (d) caseload size and knowledge. In addition to descriptive…

There is abundant literature about interviewer effects on the survey process, but studies of interviewer training are quite limited. Previous research has produced mixed findings on how training affects interviewer performance. Trainings are often conducted in person despite the mixed findings. There has been no research that examines the use of…

Survey nonresponse poses a significant challenge to the validity and reliability of research findings. In higher education, nonresponse warrants special attention because higher education institutions often make decisions based on empirical research. Nonresponse has been increasing in surveys of general populations, and survey researchers across…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly presented as a potential substitute for humans, including as research subjects. However, there is no scientific consensus on how closely these in silico clones can emulate survey respondents. While some defend the use of these "synthetic users," others point toward social biases in…

In a probability sampling survey, adaptive data collection strategies may be used to obtain a response set that minimizes nonresponse bias within budget constraints. Previous research has stratified the target population into subgroups defined by categories of auxiliary variables observed for the entire population, and tailored strategies to…

Trust is a foundational concept of contemporary sociological theory. Still, empirical research on trust relies on a relatively small set of measures. These are increasingly debated, potentially undermining large swathes of empirical evidence. Drawing on a combination of open-ended probing data, supervised machine learning, and a U.S.…