Tobias Gummer
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 122154 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Tobias Gummer |
| PRENOMES | Tobias |
| SOBRENOME | Gummer |
| ASSINATURA | GUMMER T |
| AFILIAÇÕES | GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6469-7802 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 151 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 43 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2014 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Survey data collection during the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany
The COVID-19 pandemic created a high demand for rapid data collection while also posing major challenges to collecting timely, high-quality population survey data on public health, and health-related behavior and attitudes. In the Survey Data Collection during the COVID-19 Pandemic (SDCCP) project, we examined how data collection standards evolved during the pandemic and what challenges the national survey infrastructure in Germany was facing. Ou…
Education bias in probability-based surveys in Germany
Assessing Data Quality in the Age of Digital Social Research
While survey data has long been the focus of quantitative social science analyses, observational and content data, although long-established, are gaining renewed attention; especially when this type of data is obtained by and for observing digital content and behavior. Today, digital technologies allow social scientists to track “everyday behavior” and to extract opinions from public discussions on online platforms. These new types of digital tra…
Instructed Response Item Attention Checks in Mixed-mode Questionnaires
Mostly in web surveys, attention checks have been proposed to identify inattentive respondents in self-administered surveys as previous research has argued that low-quality answers may introduce severe biases in data analyses. The increasing popularity of mixing survey modes for conducting probability-based surveys amplifies the need for systematic research on the implementation of attention checks in these survey designs. Our study investigates …
The Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on the Design of Repeated Cross-Sectional and Panel Surveys in Germany
The COVID-19 pandemic posed a major challenge for the implementation of population surveys, particularly longitudinal studies such as repeated cross-sectional and panel surveys. Since these surveys aim to measure change in many indicators over time, any modifications to their design must be carefully considered as they might compromise comparability over time. In our study, we examined how the pandemic affected the data collection of longitudinal…
How to Detect Lookups to Political Knowledge Questions in Web Surveys
Political knowledge questions often are used in social sciences web surveys to study political literacy, identify knowledge gaps and misinformation, examine political polarization, and predict political behavior. However, knowledge questions are subject to bias when respondents look up the correct answers online. Lookup behavior can confound knowledge scores and challenge the validity of substantive analyses. Previous research has used self-repor…
Measurement Quality of a Multi-item Scale in Plain Language
To ensure good measurement quality, survey questions should be clear, concise, and easily understandable for all respondents. One way of achieving this is to use plain language, an approach comprising a set of measures relating to the wording, sentence structure, and design of texts. Using a between-subjects design in a web survey, we tested whether a multi-item scale in plain language leads to better measurement quality while having similar scal…
Follow-up Survey of Panel Attriters Investigating Reasons for Attrition and Willingness to Rejoin
This study examined the feasibility of conducting a follow-up survey of panel attriters as a panel maintenance measure to investigate respondents' reasons for attrition, assessing their willingness to rejoin, and updating their addresses. We surveyed FReDA panelists who had not participated in two consecutive subwaves and were excluded from the panel. The response rate for the follow-up survey was 7.1%. The most common reasons for non-participati…
A new data infrastructure for family research and demographic analysis
This data brief introduces the German Family Demography Panel Study (FReDA; https://www.freda-panel.de/), a longitudinal, multi-actor database for family research. Major substantive fields addressed in the questionnaire include fertility-related attitudes and behaviours, reproductive health, work-family conflict, couples' division of labour, gender roles, intimate relationships, separation and divorce, parenting and intergenerational relations, a…
An empirical evaluation of probing questions investigating question comprehensibility in web surveys
It is essential for the quality of survey data that questions are easy to understand. We developed four variants of comprehensibility probes measuring the comprehensibility of a survey question as a whole or of individual aspects (vocabulary, sentence complexity, content). We compared the probes on four experimental questions in terms of response distributions and mean comprehensibility scores to assess their sensitivity to capture comprehensibil…
Effects of objective and perceived burden on response quality in web surveys
Using Google Trends Data to Study High-Frequency Search Terms
Google Trends (GT) data are increasingly used in the social sciences and adjacent fields. However, previous research on the quality of GT data has raised concerns regarding their reliability. In the present study, we investigated whether reliability differs between low- and high-frequency search terms. In other words, we explored the existence of a reliability-frequency continuum in GT data. Our study adds to previous research by investigating a …
The Impact of Survey Mode Design and Questionnaire Length on Measurement Quality
Mixed-mode surveys are popular as they can save costs and maintain (or improve) response rates relative to single-mode surveys. Nevertheless, it is not yet clear how design decisions like survey mode or questionnaire length impact measurement quality. In this study, we compare measurement quality in an experiment of three distinct survey designs implemented in the German sample of the European Values Study: a single-mode face-to-face design, a mi…
Is there a growing use of mobile devices in web surveys? Evidence from 128 web surveys in Germany
Recent advances in web survey methodology were motivated by the observation that respondents increasingly use mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to participate in web surveys. Even though we do not doubt this general observation, we argue that the claim is lacking a solid empirical basis. Most research on increasing mobile device use in web surveys covers limited periods of time and/or analyzes data from only one study or panel. The…
Survey experience and its positive impact on response behavior in longitudinal surveys
Across waves of a panel survey, panel members are repeatedly exposed to the same or very similar survey questions, which might lead to learning effects. We used data from 24 waves of online interviews in a probability-based panel survey to investigate the positive and negative effects of becoming more familiar with the survey questions. We found that respondents became increasingly faster when answering the same questions across waves. Our analys…
Plain language in web questionnaires
In web surveys, no interviewer is present to clarify question comprehension problems, which can be particularly prevalent among respondents with low literacy skills. Although plain language is used in various contexts to improve text comprehensibility, its use in social science questionnaires has not been investigated to date. Using a between-subjects design, we compared the use of plain language and standard language in a web questionnaire in te…
The interplay of incentives and mode-choice design in self-administered mixed-mode surveys
Self-administered mixed-mode surveys are increasingly used as an alternative to face-to-face surveys for collecting data from the general population. However, little is known about how decisions regarding the incentive scheme and the mode-choice design jointly affect key outcomes such as response rates, net sample composition, and survey costs. To study this, we drew a probability sample of the residential population of the city of Mannheim, Germ…
Early and Late Participation during the Field Period
Reluctance of respondents to participate in surveys has long drawn the attention of survey researchers. Yet, little is known about what drives a respondent’s decision to answer the survey invitation early or late during the field period. Moreover, we still lack evidence on response timing in longitudinal surveys. That is, the questions on whether response timing is a rather stable respondent characteristic and what—if anything—affects change in r…
How to Detect and Influence Looking Up Answers to Political Knowledge Questions in Web Surveys
When answering political knowledge questions in web surveys, respondents can look up the correct answer on the Internet. This response behavior artificially inflates political knowledge scores that are supposed to measure fact-based information. In the present study, we address the existing knowledge gaps of previous research regarding looking up answers to political knowledge questions in web surveys. We conducted an experimental study based on …
Gaining Consent to Survey Respondents' Partners
Dyadic surveys aim to interview pairs of respondents, such as partners in a relationship. In dyadic surveys, it is often necessary to obtain the anchors' consent to contact their partners and invite them to a survey. If the survey is operated in self-administered modes, no interviewer is present to improve the consent rate, for example, by providing convincing arguments and additional information. To overcome the challenges posed by self-administ…
Using Google Trends Data to Learn More About Survey Participation
As response rates continue to decline, the need to learn more about the survey participation process remains an important task for survey researchers. Search engine data may be one possible source for learning about what information some potential respondents are looking up about a survey when they are making a participation decision. In the present study, we explored the potential of search engine data for learning about survey participation and…
The Issue of Noncompliance in Attention Check Questions
Attention checks detect inattentiveness by instructing respondents to perform a specific task. However, while respondents may correctly process the task, they may choose to not comply with the instructions. We investigated the issue of noncompliance in attention checks in two web surveys. In Study 1, we measured respondents’ attitudes toward attention checks and their self-reported compliance. In Study 2, we experimentally varied the reasons give…
Relying on External Information Sources When Answering Knowledge Questions in Web Surveys
Knowledge questions frequently are used in survey research to measure respondents' topic-related cognitive ability and memory. However, in self-administered surveys, respondents can search external sources for additional information to answer a knowledge question correctly. In this case, the knowledge question measures accessible and procedural memory. Depending on what the knowledge question aims at, the validity of this measure is limited. Thus…
Using Instructed Response Items as Attention Checks in Web Surveys
Identifying inattentive respondents in self-administered surveys is a challenging goal for survey researchers. Instructed response items (IRIs) provide a measure for inattentiveness in grid questions that is easy to implement. The present article adds to the sparse research on the use and implementation of attention checks by addressing three research objectives. In a first study, we provide evidence that IRIs identify respondents who show an ele…
The European Values Study 2017
The European Values Study (EVS) was first conducted in 1981 and then repeated in 1990, 1999, 2008, and 2017, with the aim of providing researchers with data to investigate whether European individual and social values are changing and to what degree. The EVS is traditionally carried out as a probability-based face-to-face survey that takes around 1 hour to complete. In recent years, large-scale population surveys such as the EVS have been challen…
Conducting General Social Surveys as Self-Administered Mixed-Mode Surveys
This article discusses the current challenges of conducting a General Social Survey (GSS) in face-to-face mode and evaluates the alternative of fielding these surveys in self-administered mixed-mode (web, mail) instead. Based on data from Germany, it first illustrates the stark decline of participation in face-to-face surveys since 2002 and reports a strong increase in the cost of conducting these surveys over the same period. It then discusses t…
Family Research and Demographic Analysis (FReDA)
This article introduces the evolution, framework, objectives, and design of the new data infrastructure 'FReDA - The German Family-Demographic Panel Study', which has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) since 2020. FReDA is rooted in the Generation and Gender Survey (GGS) and the German Family Panel (pairfam). FReDA was initiated to facilitate research on family and demography by providing a comprehensive p…
Explaining Interview Duration in Web Surveys
Interview duration is an important variable in web surveys because it is a direct measure of the response burden. In this article, we analyze the effects of the survey design, respondent characteristics, and the interaction between these effects on interview duration. For that purpose, we applied multilevel analysis to a data set of 21 web surveys on political attitudes and behavior. Our results showed that factors on both levels, the individual …
Using Instructed Response Items as Attention Checks in Web Surveys
Identifying inattentive respondents in self-administered surveys is a challenging goal for survey researchers. Instructed response items (IRIs) provide a measure for inattentiveness in grid questions that is easy to implement. The present article adds to the sparse research on the use and implementation of attention checks by addressing three research objectives. In a first study, we provide evidence that IRIs identify respondents who show an ele…
Relying on External Information Sources When Answering Knowledge Questions in Web Surveys
Knowledge questions frequently are used in survey research to measure respondents' topic-related cognitive ability and memory. However, in self-administered surveys, respondents can search external sources for additional information to answer a knowledge question correctly. In this case, the knowledge question measures accessible and procedural memory. Depending on what the knowledge question aims at, the validity of this measure is limited. Thus…
Does Increasing Mobile Device Coverage Reduce Heterogeneity in Completing Web Surveys on Smartphones
Mobile coverage recently has reached an all-time high, and in most countries, high-speed Internet connections are widely available. Due to technological development, smartphones and tablets have become increasingly popular. Accordingly, we have observed an increasing use of mobile devices to complete web surveys and, hence, survey methodologists have shifted their attention to the challenges that stem from this development. The present study inve…
A new data infrastructure for family research and demographic analysis
This data brief introduces the German Family Demography Panel Study (FReDA; https://www.freda-panel.de/), a longitudinal, multi-actor database for family research. Major substantive fields addressed in the questionnaire include fertility-related attitudes and behaviours, reproductive health, work-family conflict, couples' division of labour, gender roles, intimate relationships, separation and divorce, parenting and intergenerational relations, a…
The European Values Study 2017
The European Values Study (EVS) was first conducted in 1981 and then repeated in 1990, 1999, 2008, and 2017, with the aim of providing researchers with data to investigate whether European individual and social values are changing and to what degree. The EVS is traditionally carried out as a probability-based face-to-face survey that takes around 1 hour to complete. In recent years, large-scale population surveys such as the EVS have been challen…
Using Paradata to Predict and Correct for Panel Attrition
This article addresses the questions of whether paradata can help us to improve the models of panel attrition and whether paradata can improve the effectiveness of propensity score weights with respect to reducing attrition biases. The main advantage of paradata is that it is collected as a by-product of the survey process. However, it is still an open question which paradata can be used to model attrition and to what extent these paradata are co…
Learning Facts About Migration
Information processing during heated debates on asylum and immigration may often be influenced by prejudice rather than a desire to learn facts. In this article, we investigate how people process empirical evidence on the consequences of refugee arrivals through a novel survey experiment that disentangles politically motivated learning from other forms of learning and expressive responding. Specifically, we ask respondents to interpret a 2×2 tabl…
How to Detect and Influence Looking Up Answers to Political Knowledge Questions in Web Surveys
When answering political knowledge questions in web surveys, respondents can look up the correct answer on the Internet. This response behavior artificially inflates political knowledge scores that are supposed to measure fact-based information. In the present study, we address the existing knowledge gaps of previous research regarding looking up answers to political knowledge questions in web surveys. We conducted an experimental study based on …
The Issue of Noncompliance in Attention Check Questions
Attention checks detect inattentiveness by instructing respondents to perform a specific task. However, while respondents may correctly process the task, they may choose to not comply with the instructions. We investigated the issue of noncompliance in attention checks in two web surveys. In Study 1, we measured respondents’ attitudes toward attention checks and their self-reported compliance. In Study 2, we experimentally varied the reasons give…
A Note on How Prior Survey Experience With Self-Administered Panel Surveys Affects Attrition in Different Modes
Attrition poses an important challenge for panel surveys. With respect to these surveys, respondents’ decisions about whether to participate in reinterviews are affected by their participation in prior waves of the panel. However, in self-administered mixed-mode panels, the way of experiencing a survey differs between the mail mode and the web mode. Consequently, this study investigated how respondents’ prior experience with the characteristics o…
Survey experience and its positive impact on response behavior in longitudinal surveys
Across waves of a panel survey, panel members are repeatedly exposed to the same or very similar survey questions, which might lead to learning effects. We used data from 24 waves of online interviews in a probability-based panel survey to investigate the positive and negative effects of becoming more familiar with the survey questions. We found that respondents became increasingly faster when answering the same questions across waves. Our analys…
Using Google Trends Data to Learn More About Survey Participation
As response rates continue to decline, the need to learn more about the survey participation process remains an important task for survey researchers. Search engine data may be one possible source for learning about what information some potential respondents are looking up about a survey when they are making a participation decision. In the present study, we explored the potential of search engine data for learning about survey participation and…
Assessing Trends and Decomposing Change in Nonresponse Bias
Survey research is still confronted by a trend of increasing nonresponse rates. In this context, several methodological advances have been made to stimulate participation and avoid bias. Yet, despite the growing number of tools and methods to deal with nonresponse, little is known about whether nonresponse biases show similar trends as nonresponse rates and what mechanisms (if any) drive changes in bias. Our article focuses on biases in cohort di…
Education bias in probability-based surveys in Germany
Early and Late Participation during the Field Period
Reluctance of respondents to participate in surveys has long drawn the attention of survey researchers. Yet, little is known about what drives a respondent’s decision to answer the survey invitation early or late during the field period. Moreover, we still lack evidence on response timing in longitudinal surveys. That is, the questions on whether response timing is a rather stable respondent characteristic and what—if anything—affects change in r…
Gaining Consent to Survey Respondents' Partners
Dyadic surveys aim to interview pairs of respondents, such as partners in a relationship. In dyadic surveys, it is often necessary to obtain the anchors' consent to contact their partners and invite them to a survey. If the survey is operated in self-administered modes, no interviewer is present to improve the consent rate, for example, by providing convincing arguments and additional information. To overcome the challenges posed by self-administ…
The effects of propensity score weighting on attrition biases in attitudinal, behavioral, and socio-demographic variables in a short-term web-based panel survey
Propensity score weighting often is used to correct for attrition biases in panel surveys. While methodological literature exists on the logic of propensity score weighting and its practical applications, an in-depth discussion is lacking on the effects of using this weighting to correct for attrition biases in attitudinal, behavioral, and socio-demographic variables. By applying a split panel design, we assessed the effects of weighting on attri…
How to Detect Lookups to Political Knowledge Questions in Web Surveys
Political knowledge questions often are used in social sciences web surveys to study political literacy, identify knowledge gaps and misinformation, examine political polarization, and predict political behavior. However, knowledge questions are subject to bias when respondents look up the correct answers online. Lookup behavior can confound knowledge scores and challenge the validity of substantive analyses. Previous research has used self-repor…
Measurement Quality of a Multi-item Scale in Plain Language
To ensure good measurement quality, survey questions should be clear, concise, and easily understandable for all respondents. One way of achieving this is to use plain language, an approach comprising a set of measures relating to the wording, sentence structure, and design of texts. Using a between-subjects design in a web survey, we tested whether a multi-item scale in plain language leads to better measurement quality while having similar scal…
Follow-up Survey of Panel Attriters Investigating Reasons for Attrition and Willingness to Rejoin
This study examined the feasibility of conducting a follow-up survey of panel attriters as a panel maintenance measure to investigate respondents' reasons for attrition, assessing their willingness to rejoin, and updating their addresses. We surveyed FReDA panelists who had not participated in two consecutive subwaves and were excluded from the panel. The response rate for the follow-up survey was 7.1%. The most common reasons for non-participati…
Effects of objective and perceived burden on response quality in web surveys
Plain language in web questionnaires
In web surveys, no interviewer is present to clarify question comprehension problems, which can be particularly prevalent among respondents with low literacy skills. Although plain language is used in various contexts to improve text comprehensibility, its use in social science questionnaires has not been investigated to date. Using a between-subjects design, we compared the use of plain language and standard language in a web questionnaire in te…
Explaining Interview Duration in Web Surveys
Interview duration is an important variable in web surveys because it is a direct measure of the response burden. In this article, we analyze the effects of the survey design, respondent characteristics, and the interaction between these effects on interview duration. For that purpose, we applied multilevel analysis to a data set of 21 web surveys on political attitudes and behavior. Our results showed that factors on both levels, the individual …
Multiple Panels in der Empirischen Sozialforschung
Multiple Panels in der Empirischen Sozialforschung
Using Paradata to Predict and Correct for Panel Attrition
This article addresses the questions of whether paradata can help us to improve the models of panel attrition and whether paradata can improve the effectiveness of propensity score weights with respect to reducing attrition biases. The main advantage of paradata is that it is collected as a by-product of the survey process. However, it is still an open question which paradata can be used to model attrition and to what extent these paradata are co…
When near means related
In this article, we present the results of three question design experiments on inter-item correlations, which tested a grid design against a single-item design. The first and second experiments examined the inter-item correlations of a set with five and seven items, respectively, and the third experiment examined the impact of the question design on inter-item correlations of follow-up questions. We found that the inter-item correlations in grid…
‘Show me the money and the party!’ – variation in Facebook and Twitter adoption by politicians
Our study explores the adoption of Facebook and Twitter by candidates in the 2013 German Federal elections. Utilizing data from the German Longitudinal Election Study candidate survey fused with data gathered on the Twitter and Facebook use of candidates, we draw a clear distinction between Facebook and Twitter. We show that adoption of both channels is primarily driven by two factors: party and money. But the impact of each plays out differently…
The effects of propensity score weighting on attrition biases in attitudinal, behavioral, and socio-demographic variables in a short-term web-based panel survey
Propensity score weighting often is used to correct for attrition biases in panel surveys. While methodological literature exists on the logic of propensity score weighting and its practical applications, an in-depth discussion is lacking on the effects of using this weighting to correct for attrition biases in attitudinal, behavioral, and socio-demographic variables. By applying a split panel design, we assessed the effects of weighting on attri…
Learning effects in coders and their implications for managing content analyses
From the perspective of study management, research is surprisingly lacking on two of the major challenges for planning and performing content analysis: determining the sample size (i.e. number of objects to code) and the required number of coders to hire. The optimization of both of these numbers will ultimately determine how efficiently available resources are used. This study contributes to the methodological discussion on coding by identifying…
Does Increasing Mobile Device Coverage Reduce Heterogeneity in Completing Web Surveys on Smartphones
Mobile coverage recently has reached an all-time high, and in most countries, high-speed Internet connections are widely available. Due to technological development, smartphones and tablets have become increasingly popular. Accordingly, we have observed an increasing use of mobile devices to complete web surveys and, hence, survey methodologists have shifted their attention to the challenges that stem from this development. The present study inve…
A Note on How Prior Survey Experience With Self-Administered Panel Surveys Affects Attrition in Different Modes
Attrition poses an important challenge for panel surveys. With respect to these surveys, respondents’ decisions about whether to participate in reinterviews are affected by their participation in prior waves of the panel. However, in self-administered mixed-mode panels, the way of experiencing a survey differs between the mail mode and the web mode. Consequently, this study investigated how respondents’ prior experience with the characteristics o…
Experimental Evidence on Reducing Nonresponse Bias through Case Prioritization
To reduce nonresponse bias in surveys, it has been suggested that researchers allocate additional fieldwork efforts to cases with low estimated response propensity. If these efforts are successful, nonresponse bias may be reduced by changing the variance of response propensities and hence the covariance between response propensities and variables of interest. The present study provides experimental evidence about how to intervene on low-propensit…
What’s my wage again? Comparing survey and administrative data to validate earning measures
One question frequently included in surveys asks about respondents’ earnings. As this information serves, for example, as a basis for evaluating policy interventions, it must be of high quality. This study aims to advance knowledge about possible measurement errors in earnings data and the potential of data linkage to improve substantive conclusions. We use the German sample of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies …
Understanding Respondents’ Attitudes Toward Web Paradata Use
The collection and use of paradata is gaining in importance, especially in web surveys. From a research ethics’ perspective, respondents should be asked for their consent to the collection and use of web paradata. In this context, a positive attitude toward paradata use has been deemed to be a prerequisite for respondents’ willingness to share their paradata. The present study aimed to identify factors affecting respondents’ attitudes toward para…
Assessing Trends and Decomposing Change in Nonresponse Bias
Survey research is still confronted by a trend of increasing nonresponse rates. In this context, several methodological advances have been made to stimulate participation and avoid bias. Yet, despite the growing number of tools and methods to deal with nonresponse, little is known about whether nonresponse biases show similar trends as nonresponse rates and what mechanisms (if any) drive changes in bias. Our article focuses on biases in cohort di…
Using Only Numeric Labels Instead of Verbal Labels
With the increasing use of smartphones in web surveys, considerable efforts have been devoted to reduce the amount of screen space taken up by questions. An emerging stream of research in this area is aimed at optimizing the design elements of rating scales. One suggestion that has been made is to completely abandon verbal labels and use only numeric labels instead. This approach deliberately shifts the task of scale interpretation to the respond…
Using Instructed Response Items as Attention Checks in Web Surveys
Identifying inattentive respondents in self-administered surveys is a challenging goal for survey researchers. Instructed response items (IRIs) provide a measure for inattentiveness in grid questions that is easy to implement. The present article adds to the sparse research on the use and implementation of attention checks by addressing three research objectives. In a first study, we provide evidence that IRIs identify respondents who show an ele…
The European Values Study 2017
The European Values Study (EVS) was first conducted in 1981 and then repeated in 1990, 1999, 2008, and 2017, with the aim of providing researchers with data to investigate whether European individual and social values are changing and to what degree. The EVS is traditionally carried out as a probability-based face-to-face survey that takes around 1 hour to complete. In recent years, large-scale population surveys such as the EVS have been challen…
Conducting General Social Surveys as Self-Administered Mixed-Mode Surveys
This article discusses the current challenges of conducting a General Social Survey (GSS) in face-to-face mode and evaluates the alternative of fielding these surveys in self-administered mixed-mode (web, mail) instead. Based on data from Germany, it first illustrates the stark decline of participation in face-to-face surveys since 2002 and reports a strong increase in the cost of conducting these surveys over the same period. It then discusses t…
Learning Facts About Migration
Information processing during heated debates on asylum and immigration may often be influenced by prejudice rather than a desire to learn facts. In this article, we investigate how people process empirical evidence on the consequences of refugee arrivals through a novel survey experiment that disentangles politically motivated learning from other forms of learning and expressive responding. Specifically, we ask respondents to interpret a 2×2 tabl…
Family Research and Demographic Analysis (FReDA)
This article introduces the evolution, framework, objectives, and design of the new data infrastructure 'FReDA - The German Family-Demographic Panel Study', which has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) since 2020. FReDA is rooted in the Generation and Gender Survey (GGS) and the German Family Panel (pairfam). FReDA was initiated to facilitate research on family and demography by providing a comprehensive p…
Using Google Trends Data to Learn More About Survey Participation
As response rates continue to decline, the need to learn more about the survey participation process remains an important task for survey researchers. Search engine data may be one possible source for learning about what information some potential respondents are looking up about a survey when they are making a participation decision. In the present study, we explored the potential of search engine data for learning about survey participation and…
The Issue of Noncompliance in Attention Check Questions
Attention checks detect inattentiveness by instructing respondents to perform a specific task. However, while respondents may correctly process the task, they may choose to not comply with the instructions. We investigated the issue of noncompliance in attention checks in two web surveys. In Study 1, we measured respondents’ attitudes toward attention checks and their self-reported compliance. In Study 2, we experimentally varied the reasons give…
Relying on External Information Sources When Answering Knowledge Questions in Web Surveys
Knowledge questions frequently are used in survey research to measure respondents' topic-related cognitive ability and memory. However, in self-administered surveys, respondents can search external sources for additional information to answer a knowledge question correctly. In this case, the knowledge question measures accessible and procedural memory. Depending on what the knowledge question aims at, the validity of this measure is limited. Thus…
Is there a growing use of mobile devices in web surveys? Evidence from 128 web surveys in Germany
Recent advances in web survey methodology were motivated by the observation that respondents increasingly use mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to participate in web surveys. Even though we do not doubt this general observation, we argue that the claim is lacking a solid empirical basis. Most research on increasing mobile device use in web surveys covers limited periods of time and/or analyzes data from only one study or panel. The…
Survey experience and its positive impact on response behavior in longitudinal surveys
Across waves of a panel survey, panel members are repeatedly exposed to the same or very similar survey questions, which might lead to learning effects. We used data from 24 waves of online interviews in a probability-based panel survey to investigate the positive and negative effects of becoming more familiar with the survey questions. We found that respondents became increasingly faster when answering the same questions across waves. Our analys…
Survey Methodology and Nonresponse (32 obras) · Psychology (30 obras) · Computer Science (28 obras) · Statistics (16 obras) · Mathematics (15 obras) · Sociology (14 obras) · Survey data collection (13 obras) · Applied Psychology (12 obras) · Geography (12 obras) · Political science (12 obras)