Paired interviews are used to evaluate whether a questionnaire functions properly for both the target respondent and an alternate respondent (proxy). We developed a new application of this tool to evaluate whether a Patient Experience of Care Survey (PECS) for long-term care hospitals (LTCHs) and inpatient rehabilitation facilities (IRFs)…

Empirical researchers using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) can work with crisp, multivalue, and fuzzy sets. The relative advantages of crisp and multivalue sets have been discussed in the QCA literature. There has been little reflection on the more frequent decision between crisp and fuzzy sets for which there often is no theoretical…

Telephone survey interviewers need to be able to accurately record answers to questions. While straightforward for closed questions, this task can be complicated for open questions. We examine interviewer recording accuracy rates from a national landline random digit dial telephone survey. We find that accuracy rates are over 90% for numeric…

Migration of participants in demographic and epidemiological studies results in missing data. One approach to reduce resulting losses in statistical power and potential biases is to follow up migrants at their new residence. We describe the follow-up of migrants who were eligible for participation in a trial of a new questionnaire to measure adult…

Factorial surveys are widely used in the social sciences to measure respondents' attitudes, beliefs, or behavioral intentions. In such surveys, respondents evaluate short descriptions of hypothetical situations, persons, or objects that vary across several dimensions. An important prerequisite of the method's validity is that respondents are able…

Acquiescence is often defined as the systematic selection of agreeable ("strongly agree") or affirmative ("yes") responses to survey items, regardless of item content or directionality. This definition implies that acquiescence is immune to item characteristics; however, the influence of item characteristics on acquiescence…

Internet-based platforms are increasingly used to collect qualitative data. We conducted a quasi-experimental study to explore whether data collection mode affects data content and data collection costs. Participants (N = 171) were assigned systematically to one of four modes--(1) in-person (control), (2) online video-based, (3) online chat-based,…

The Gulf Cooperation Council is a regional cooperation of six Middle Eastern countries--Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman. A common feature of these countries is the existence of many group quarters, usually called labor camps, a term used to refer to housing accommodations for unskilled migrants where…

One challenge of collecting socioeconomic data, such as data on time-use, is recall biases. While time-use researchers have continuously developed new methods to make data collection more accurate and easy, these methods are difficult to use in developing countries, where study participants may have low literacy levels and no clock-based concepts…

A key challenge in the design of effective survey questionnaires is to write questions that respondents can understand consistently. Recommendations in the questionnaire design literature propose the use of respondents' own terminology to facilitate comprehension and the response process. In this article, we propose an innovative questionnaire…

Online platforms offer new opportunities to study human behavior. However, while social scientists are often interested in using behavioral trace data--data created by a user over the course of their everyday life--to draw inferences about users, many online platforms only allow data to be sampled based on user activities (leading to data sets…

Best practices in mail survey design advise personalizing correspondence, but most research predates the use of address-based sampling (ABS) in which a householder's name either cannot be matched to an address or may be matched incorrectly. Further, recent evidence casts doubt on the effectiveness of personalization. The current study examines the…

Specific interviewer characteristics, interviewer continuity, or matching interviewer and household characteristics may increase cooperation, especially for difficult-to-convince households. In face-to-face surveys, unobserved heterogeneity often makes a proper analysis of interviewer effects impossible. Although surveys conducted in telephone…

In today's survey climate, many individuals doubt the legitimacy of survey invitations. Phishing, an Internet-based fraud that tricks users into disclosing private information, has the potential to further erode the perceived legitimacy of e-mailed survey invitations and harm cooperation. However, no study has tested the effect of phishing on…

Informant accuracy is a pervasive issue in the social sciences and persists through the ongoing use of self-report measures of behaviors that are subject to recall errors. The current study reports findings from methods we used to measure substance use among adolescents in South India. We used a repeated-measures, mixed-methods design that began…