Dear colleagues
we would like to draw your attention to the following call for the RC33 conference in Sydney 2012:
Measuring survey quality in cross-national surveys
This session will provide a series of original investigations on data quality in both national and international contexts. The starting premise is that all survey data contain a mixture of substantive and methodologically-induced variation. Most current work focuses primarily on random measurement error, which is usually treated as normally distributed. However, there are a large number of different kinds of systematic measurement errors, or more precisely, there are many different sources of methodologically-induced variation and all of them may have a strong influence on the "substantive" solutions. To the sources of methodologically-induced variation belong various forms of response styles, misunderstandings of questions, translation and coding errors, uneven standards between the research institutes involved in the data collection (especially in cross-national research), item- and unit non-response, as well as faked interviews. We will consider data as of high quality in case the methodologically-induced variation is low, i.e. the differences in responses can be interpreted based on theoretical assumptions in the given area of research. The aim of the session is to discuss different sources of methodologically-induced variation in survey research, how to detect them and the effects they have on the substantive findings.
Please send proposals to Jörg Blasius (jblasius@uni-bonn.demailto:jblasius@uni-bonn.de) and Christof Wolf (christof.wolf@gesis.orgmailto:christof.wolf@gesis.org) or register at the conference site; the deadline is December 1, 2011.