Survey data are the most widely used type of data in the quantitative social sciences. They have been used to investigate a huge range of societally relevant topics. However, they also have specific limitations. An effective way of addressing those is linking survey data with other types of data, such …
Mit Verbreitung des Corona-Virus sind etliche Studien und Projekte entstanden, die die Auswirkungen der COVID-19-Pandemie und ihrer Bekämpfung auf die Gesellschaft empirisch erfassen. Die Spannbreite ist groß und reicht von Momentaufnahmen in Befragungen mit selbstselektierten Stichproben, repräsentativ angelegten Surveys, Corona-Tagebüchern bis hin zur Aufnahme in Langzeitstudien. Der RatSWD hat von …
In the finale of season 1 of the blog series, I explore the idea to craft control variables that help us mitigate quality and comparability issues in our source surveys. Embedding such control variables into our ex-post harmonized datasets creates a living documentation of our source material and our harmonization …
This time, we apply multiple imputation to harmonize data for the same construct measured different instruments. We will treat data as swiss cheese and then unleash mice, sorry MICE, on it. The approach will pose some hurdles regarding the required data and the analysis complexity. However, if those hurdles are …
Equipercentile equating is an alternative version of observed score equating that can accommodate non-normal response distributions. It corrects for differences in mean and standard deviation but also higher distribution moments, such as skewness and kurtosis. This helps harmonize instruments, where, for example, respondents mostly choose high (or low) response options. …
The outbreak of COVID-19 has created new challenges for face-to-face research activities, including conducting in-person cognitive interviews. The first lockdown in Germany in mid-March 2020 coincided with the preparation phase of a pretest that we planned to conduct face-to-face in our pretest lab in Mannheim. Since we were no longer …