Although it has long been acknowledged that interviewers play a crucial role in the survey data collection process, there is little research concerning interviewer effects on how respondents perceive the interview. We investigate whether interviewer effects exist regarding how much respondents report having enjoyed the interview and whether these…

Estimating prescription medicine use is challenging due to recall bias associated with surveys and coverage bias in administrative data. This study assesses how making operational improvements and combining both survey and administrative data sources can increase data quality on filled prescriptions. We use data from the Medicare Current…

Social network research often depends on the willingness of respondents to provide personal information about themselves and alters. Survey design strategies that increase willingness to share this information are necessary for social network research to be feasible, especially when name generators are used for sampling because rosters are…

Dependability (also known as consistency) is one of four criteria in rigor and trustworthiness in qualitative research. In this article, the process of establishing consistency is discussed through the lenses of constructivism and interpretivism, as the observed social reality is viewed as epistemologically counter-intuitive. Two strategies were…

Data donation is a novel approach to collecting digital trace data, where users are asked to download their retrospective data from a platform and share them with the researchers. Little is known about the willingness to donate data and the potential bias that may arise from nonparticipation. We conducted a study among over 900 German Facebook…

Event history calendars (EHCs) are frequently used in social measurement to capture important information about the time ordering of events in people's lives and enable inference about the relationships of the events with other outcomes of interest. To date, EHCs have primarily been designed for face-to-face or telephone survey interviewing, and…

Despite recent methodological advances in saturation, guidelines for its estimation in more complex research designs--such as ethnographic studies--have been lacking. We present an accessible, step-by-step approach to empirical assessment of data saturation, tested on a moderately sized ethnographic study with 109 combined direct observations and…

Cost-effective and user-friendly, mobile phone-assisted methods have remained underutilized in qualitative social science research. The scarce methodological guidance, together with recruitment and ethical challenges, has arguably stifled advancements in this area. COVID-19 exposed the need to better equip researchers with the expertise and tools…

From September 2016 to September 2018, we piloted the collection of financial transaction and account balance data in the Understanding America Study (UAS), a probability-based Internet panel representative of the U.S. adult population. Unlike previous studies relying on electronic transaction information from financial aggregators, which…

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…

Conducting field research with a vulnerable population is difficult under the most auspicious conditions, and these difficulties only increase during a pandemic. Here, we describe the practical challenges and ethical considerations surrounding a recent data collection effort with a high-risk population during the COVID-19 pandemic. We detail our…

Not knowing the population size is a common problem in data-limited contexts. Drawing on work in Sierra Leone, this short take outlines a four-step solution to this problem: (1) estimate the population size using expert interviews; (2) verify estimates using interviews with participants sampled; (3) triangulate using secondary data; and (4)…

Conducting research among hard-to-reach populations is a difficult endeavor because some of their characteristics are known to be associated with survey nonresponse and panel attrition. In the case of the Parchemins study, which followed undocumented migrants over their process of regularization and during the first years of regularized life in…

Expected yield rates are essential to a survey's data collection plan, as they inform requisite sample sizes to meet the survey's objectives. Given an overall expected yield rate for a self-administered mail survey, this short take describes a simple method for using the Census Planning Database to assign differential yield rates to lower-level…

Even small monetary incentives, e.g., a one-dollar bill in a postal invitation letter, can increase the response rate in a web survey. However, in the euro currency area, the smallest amount of monetary incentive for a postal invitation is a five-euro bill, which is costly. As such, we conducted a random experiment with prepaid stamp and postcard…