The proportion of web survey responses submitted from mobile devices such as smartphones is increasing steadily. This trend presents new methodological challenges because mobile responses are often associated with increased breakoffs, which, in turn, can increase nonresponse bias. Using data from a survey of college students with more than 20,000 respondents, response patterns are examined to identify

This study presents results from a randomized experiment in the 2015–2017 National Survey of Family Growth, where a large national sample of U.S. individuals aged 15–49 was randomly assigned to one of two different versions of a survey question about sexual identity (one with three response options, including heterosexual, gay/lesbian, and bisexual, and one adding the option “something else”). Analyses

Increasingly surveys are using interviewers to collect objective health measures, also known as biomeasures, to replace or supplement traditional self-reported health measures. However, the extent to which interviewers affect the (im)precision of biomeasurements is largely unknown. This article investigates interviewer effects on several biomeasures collected in three waves of the National Social Life

This article concerns online data capture using survey methods when the target population(s) comprise not just of several different language-using groups, but additionally populations who may be multilingual and whose total language repertoires are commonly employed in meaning-making practices—commonly referred to as translanguaging. It addresses whether current online data capture survey methods adequately

Participatory research engages a transdisciplinary team of stakeholders in all aspects of the research process. Such engagement can lead to shifts in the research design, as well as who is considered a participant. We detail our experiences of studying an evolving stakeholder network in the context of a 2.5-year transdisciplinary, participatory project. We show how participation leads to shifts in

Behavioral research increasingly uses accelerometers to provide objective estimates of physical activity. This study extends research on methods for collecting accelerometer data among youth by examining whether the amount of a monetary incentive affects enrollment and compliance in a mail-based accelerometer study of adolescents. We invited a subset of adolescents in a national web-based study to

Self-assessment measures are commonly used in questionnaire surveys. However, one of the problems with self-reports is that they may be prone to differences in scale usage among respondents. The anchoring vignette method addresses this issue. It relies on two assumptions: response consistency and vignette equivalence. Here we aim to develop a framework for the examination of these assumptions using

Food insecurity (FI) is often assessed through experienced-based measures, which address the number and extent of coping strategies people employ. Coping indices are limited because, methodologically, they presuppose that people engage coping strategies uniformly. Ethnographic work suggests that subgroups experience FI quite differently, meaning that coping strategies might also vary within a population

This short take describes the process of enhancing social network interviews with qualitative inquiry to facilitate participant recall, contextualize participant–alter relationships, and increase cultural responsiveness with populations with cognitive impairments. The authors illustrate this process, including the use of a qualitative interviewing name generator, with an example of a mixed-methods

This research analyzes the effectiveness of the list experiment and crosswise model in measuring self-plagiarism and data manipulation. Both methods were implemented in a large-scale survey of academics on social norms and academic misconduct. As the results lend little confidence about the effectiveness of the methods, researchers are best advised to avoid them or, at best, to handle them with care

Transforming spoken words into written text in qualitative research is a vital step in familiarizing and immersing oneself in the data. We share a three-step approach of how data transcription facilitated an interpretative act of analysis in a study using qualitative data collection methods on the barriers and facilitators of HIV testing and treatment in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

To identify the dominant cultural models among parents transmitting faith to their children, we find few methodological guidelines to guide coding and analysis of semi-structured interviews. We thus developed a three-phase procedure for our research team. Phase-one follows Campbell et al. by unitizing on meanings rather than words/pages, including creating decision rules documents, keyword lists, and

Natural experiments are often used for answering research questions in which randomization is implausible. Effective recruitment strategies are well documented for observational cohort studies and clinical trials, unlike recruitment methods for time-sensitive natural experiments. In this time-sensitive study of the impact of a minimum wage policy, we aimed to recruit 900 low-wage workers in Minneapolis

Temporal aspects of child and adolescent time allocation in diverse cultural settings have been difficult to model using conventional statistical techniques. A new statistical approach, Egocentric Relational Event Modelling (EREM), allows for the simultaneous modelling of activity frequency, duration, and sequencing. Here, EREM is applied to a focal follow dataset of Congolese BaYaka forager child

Walking interviews generate contextualized dialogs and place-based narratives prompted by sites and routes. We used walking interviews with three refugee-background women in Australia to find out what the act of walking could reveal about notions of home and broader narratives of forced migration. We used a participatory approach to privilege women’s perspectives as co-creators of new knowledge on

Passive data from a tracking application (or “meter”) installed on participants’ devices to register the URLs visited have great potential for studying people’s online activities. However, given privacy concerns, obtaining cooperation installing a meter can be difficult and lead to selection bias. Therefore, in this article, we address three research questions: (1) To what extent are panelists willing

To explore the willingness to participate in genomics research among African Americans, we developed a technique specifically suited to a relaxed social setting. The “Qualitative Story Deck,” (QSD) is a gamified, structured elicitation technique that allows for the spontaneous creation of scenarios with variable attributes. We used the QSD to create research scenarios that varied on four details (race/ethnicity

A growing body of literature in low- and middle-income countries is challenging the long-held assumption that the respondent and interviewer should be strangers. We conducted a qualitative study in Burkina Faso comprised of in-depth interviews and focus group discussions to explore interviewers’ experiences of collecting data on sexual and reproductive health indicators in their communities, and their

Body mapping methods are used in sexual and reproductive health studies to encourage candid discussion of sex and sexuality, pleasure and pain, sickness and health, and to understand individuals’ perceptions of their bodies. VOICE-D, a qualitative follow-up study to the VOICE trial, developed and used a body map tool in the context of individual in-depth interviews with women in South Africa, Uganda

Researchers based in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) often cannot access conventional but high-priced ethnographic tools. I developed a low-cost methodology as an exercise in meeting the needs of both LMIC-based researchers and the broader qualitative community. As demonstrated in this proof of concept, ethnographic researchers should strive for a suite of open access software tools and common

The literature has no standard method for estimating the coverage of area probability segments in address-based frames. Versatility is desirable for different study needs, but standardization improves comparability. Many segment estimates are simple ratios of counts of frame addresses to control totals, or net coverage ratios. Challenges to segment ratios include geocoding error, outdated control totals

As relationships change and people change the kinds of support they provide, name generators that collect information about ties that provide particular kinds of support at repeated points of time may not effectively capture ties that are active but whose roles have changed. This article shows that a significant minority of network members change the kinds of support they provide. They either discontinue

Longitudinal survey and experimental research is essential for understanding psychological and economic processes, but attrition is a concern. We examine attrition in a 2016 longitudinal randomized controlled trial of more than 13,000 prospective U.S. homeowners, in which participants were invited to up to seven online surveys delivered every two weeks. Our research has two aims. First, we document

Social connections between individuals are often an important source of information for both quantitative and qualitative anthropological research. Here, we seek to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of sociometric and ethnographic representations of social connections. We do this by comparing network data collected using a sociometric technique (a name generator) with a network drawn

When informants from a given culture are asked to list items from a specified semantic domain, their lists provide two indicators of each term’s prominence or salience: its frequency of appearance across lists and its mean position within the lists that include it. Smith et al. (1995), Sutrop (2001), and most recently Robbins et al. (2017) have defined salience measures that combine these two sources

We present a qualitative data analysis framework that integrates perspectives from theme analysis, cultural models analysis, grounded theory, and content analysis. We demonstrate how these research traditions are united in their aim to, first, uncover meaningful themes and, subsequently, to understand those themes’ relationships to each other. To illustrate our approach, we present research on video

Theoretical and methodological developments guided by a cognitive theory of culture have advanced our understanding of cultural processes over the past 40 years. The theoretical construct of cultural models, developed in the 1970s, provided a more precise definition of culture. The cultural consensus model, introduced in 1986, enabled investigators to verify and analyze the degree to which culture

In this article, we present the benefits of blending the methodological characteristics of the focused ethnographic method (FEM) and case study research (CSR) for a study on auxiliary work processes in a hospital in Barcelona, Spain. We argue that incorporating CSR logic and principles in the FEM produces a better form of inquiry, as this combination improves the quality of data and the ability to

What subject lines and messages in an e-mailed invitation maximize cooperation for a web survey? Answering this question is ever more important as survey researchers increasingly turn to web surveys to reduce costs. We test respondents’ preferences for subject lines and messages in an e-mailed invitation to participate in a Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey. Findings suggest

This article introduces ethnographic upscaling, an innovative procedure to explore and test hypotheses drawn from in-depth ethnographic findings in spatially continuous cases. The approach combines the strength of localized ethnographic descriptions with questionnaire-based regional surveys to study the distribution of ethnographic findings across social groups by comparison. The approach was designed

Over the past few decades, the survey industry has experienced a steady decline in response rates, which has posed numerous challenges for researchers, most notably concerns about nonresponse bias. We present results from three studies conducted in an attempt to increase response rates and reduce nonresponse bias for a U.S. national household survey. We examined design features related to mode (i.e

Applying an approach termed “citizen sociolinguistics” offers a unique opportunity to capture a large corpus of naturally occurring language data, especially fleeting interactions. Drawing on citizen science innovations in the natural sciences, citizen sociolinguistics recruits and trains scientists to complete data-related tasks such as data collection. Additional benefits of the approach include

This study examines the effect of telephone survey dialing patterns on lab productivity and survey responses. Using an original data set of paradata from 2010 to 2017 and a machine learning technique for variable selection, we find that early and late afternoon shifts are as productive as late evening shifts for both landline and cellphone Random Digit Dialing (RDD) samples. Also, early weekdays are

Self-rated health (SRH) and subjective life expectancy (SLE) are widely used for understanding health and predicting mortality. However, what these items measure remains unclear, due to the lack of conceptual frameworks. We administered a web survey across the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, and Mexico. The questionnaire included SRH and SLE, each immediately followed by a question that

We propose a mixed methods approach to digital ethnographic research. Treating online conversational environments as communities that ethnographers engage with as in traditional fieldwork, we represent those conversations and the codes made by researchers thereon in network form. We call these networks “semantic social networks” (SSNs), as they incorporate information on social interaction and their

Previous research has shown that increasing the size of incentives can increase response rates for probability-based, cross-sectional surveys. However, the effects of incentives on web panels have not been extensively studied. We sought to answer the question: What is the effect of larger, postpaid incentives on (1) response, (2) data quality, and (3) nonresponse bias for individuals in a web panel

This article demonstrates what may be gained from combining the walk-along method with the global positioning system (GPS) and geographical information system (GIS) when exploring the social and physical aspects of locally situated daily lives. It focuses on the premise and application of the spatial transcript technique, which allows for an integration of qualitative and GPS data generated while walking

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 guidance. A review shows that researchers often prefer fuzzy

In randomized experiments, inventories with reverse-keyed items are compared with inventories in which all the items are either positively or negatively associated with the underlying concept. The results show that with reverse keying, a control of the potential bias was not sufficient; likewise, the factorial structure, reliability, and validity were negatively affected. An eye-tracking study revealed

This study describes a method for collecting data from nonliterate, non-English-speaking populations. Our audio computer-assisted self-interview instrument with color-labeled response categories was designed for use with helper assistance. The study included 30 dyads of nonliterate older Hmong respondents and family helpers answering questions about health. Analysis of video recordings identified respondents’

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, (4) online e-mail/message board-based—and randomized

A growing body of literature points to the possibilities offered by postsurvey interviewer observations as a source of paradata to obtain insights into data quality. However, their utility in predicting actual behavior of respondents has attracted limited scholarly attention so far. Using data from Round 7 of the European Social Survey, we aim to clarify the relationship between interviewer observations

The multilevel social relations model (SRM) is a commonly used statistical method for the analysis of social networks. In this article and accompanying supplemental materials, we demonstrate the estimation and interpretation of the SRM using Stat-JR software. Multiple software templates permit the analysis of different response types, including binary, counts, and continuous responses.

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 response and interviewer-code, single-response items but

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) functioned acceptably for patients and their family members

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 to deal with the highly complex task created by the

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 mortality in Niakhar, Senegal. We conducted a short

This short take presents story-mapping as a research technique that incorporates multiple methods and data sources to build visual narratives of individual and collective experiences. The goals of story-mapping are the following: (1) iteratively synthesize the collection, analysis, and representation of spatial, visual, and textual information as a narrative; (2) enable meaningful participation of

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 remains largely unexplored. We examined the influence of eight item characteristics

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 centers usually assign households to interviewers at random

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 with semistructured interviews (N = 60) to determine

This article presents results from an experiment conducted during the web-based 2017 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) to evaluate an automated refusal conversion strategy whereby a sample of individuals was given the opportunity to opt out from the survey and stop receiving additional e-mail reminders. Before being added to the unsubscribe list, however, the individual was asked to cite the

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 response rates. This article reports on a natural experiment

Web, or online, probing has the potential to supplement existing questionnaire design processes by providing structured cognitive data on a wider sample than typical qualitative-only question evaluation methods can achieve. One of the practical impediments to the further integration of web probing is the concern of survey managers about how the probes themselves may affect response to other items and

Transactional validity, a common approach in participatory research, is attained when preliminary analyses of research results are discussed with research participants and their feedback is incorporated in the analysis. Member checking is one way of achieving transactional validity, which has been heralded as a stronger version of validity reached through triangulation. Through member checking, we

Short message service (SMS or text messaging) surveys can collect data quickly and inexpensively. However, SMS surveys have space constraints that pose difficulties to questionnaire designers: Questions can only be 160 characters or less, surveys must be short, and many respondents use phones with small screens. In this article, we compare SMS and benchmark face-to-face surveys across four African

Surveys of egocentric networks are especially vulnerable to methods effects. This study combines a true experiment—random assignment of respondents to receive essentially identical questions from either an in-person interviewer or an online survey—with audio recordings of the in-person interviews. We asked over 850 respondents from a general population several different name-eliciting questions. Face-to-face

Considerable research has examined the effect of response option order in ordinal bipolar questions such as satisfaction questions. However, no research we know of has examined the effect of the order of presentation of concepts in the question stem or whether stem order moderates response option order. In this article, we experimentally test the main and interaction effects of both stem and response