Disentangling mode-specific selection and measurement bias in social surveys

Barry Schouten; Jan van den Brakel; Bart Buelens; Jan van der Laan; Thomas Klausch

doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2013.07.005

Disentangling mode-specific selection and measurement bias in social surveys

Soc Sci Res. 2013 Nov;42(6):1555-70. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2013.07.005. Epub 2013 Jul 18.

Authors

Barry Schouten¹, Jan van den Brakel, Bart Buelens, Jan van der Laan, Thomas Klausch

Affiliation

¹ Statistics Netherlands, PO Box 24500, 2490 HA Den Haag, The Netherlands. Electronic address: jg.schouten@cbs.nl.

PMID: 24090851
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2013.07.005

Abstract

A large-scale mixed-mode experiment linked to the Dutch Crime Victimization Survey was conducted in 2011. The experiment consisted of two waves; one wave with random assignment to one of the modes web, paper, telephone and face-to-face, and one follow-up wave to the full sample with interviewer modes only. The objective of the experiment is to estimate total mode effects and more specifically the corresponding mode effect components arising from undercoverage, nonresponse and measurement. In this paper, mode-specific selection and measurement bias are defined, and estimators for the bias terms based on the experimental design are introduced and discussed. The proposed estimators are applied to a number of key survey variables from the Labour Force Survey and the Crime Victimization Survey.

Keywords: Coverage; Measurement; Mixed-mode; Nonresponse; Survey modes.