Nora Cate Schaeffer
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3589535 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Nora Cate Schaeffer |
| PRENOMES | Nora Cate |
| SOBRENOME | Schaeffer |
| ASSINATURA | SCHAEFFER N C |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9837-3603 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 44 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 469 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 43 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1980 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
Conversation Analysis and Interaction in Standardized Survey Interviews
Surveys use questions to collect measurements from a sample in order to estimate characteristics of a population. The “objective” data obtained by survey interviews are achieved in the interaction between respondents and interviewers who have been trained to behave in a standardized manner. Over the years, both critics and practitioners of standardized survey interviewing have considered how the fundamentally social nature of the interview affect…
Aapor Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement
Defining the ‘Resource Unit’ for Poverty Measurement in Complex Contemporary Households
Questioning Identity
Ethnoracial identity refers to the racial and ethnic categories that people use to classify themselves and others. How it is measured in surveys has implications for understanding inequalities. Yet how people self-identify may not conform to the categories standardized survey questions use to measure ethnicity and race, leading to potential measurement error. In interviewer-administered surveys, answers to survey questions are achieved through in…
Factors Associated with Interviewers’ Evaluations of Respondents’ Performance in Telephone Interviews
Interviewers’ postinterview evaluations of respondents’ performance (IEPs) are paradata, used to describe the quality of the data obtained from respondents. IEPs are driven by a combination of factors, including respondents’ and interviewers’ sociodemographic characteristics and what actually transpires during the interview. However, relatively few studies examine how IEPs are associated with features of the response process, including facets of …
Presidential Address. Far From Ordinary Questions
As Howard Schuman noted in his presidential address in 1986, survey respondents expect to be asked “ordinary questions,” but our questions often make extraordinary demands. The impact of the difficult tasks we give to respondents on their motivation to provide complete and accurate information is an aspect of the infrastructure of measurement in surveys that has received little attention. When questions are particularly difficult for some groups …
Interaction before and during the survey interview
Conversation analysts have described the formation of actions and the sequential organization of talk in a wide variety of contexts and offer resources that can be used to study interaction in the interview. Conversational practices are relevant before and during the survey interview: First, the process of recruiting sample members to become respondents provides a site in which an analysis of actions can be applied with a measurable outcome - the…
Completing Self-administered Questionnaires
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' problems and helpers' strategies to a…
Advances in the Science of Asking Questions
In recent decades, research about survey questions has emphasized decision-based approaches. Current research focuses on identifying and systematizing characteristics of questions that are key in researchers' decisions. We describe important classes of decisions and question characteristics: topic, type of question (e.g., event or behavior, evaluation or judgment), response dimension (e.g., occurrence, frequency, intensity), conceptualization and…
Interviewers’ Ratings of Respondents’ Health
We propose that researchers incorporate IRH in surveys of older adults as a cost-effective, easily implemented, and supplementary measure of health
The Influence of Social Conditions Across the Life Course on the Human Gut Microbiota
The addition of data on the gut microbiome to the WLS-and to other population based longitudinal studies of aging-is feasible, under the right conditions, and can generate innovative research on the relationship between social conditions and the gut microbiome
The effect of response option order on self-rated health
Response to Comments on “Interviewing Practices, Conversational Practices, and Rapport
Interviewing Practices, Conversational Practices, and Rapport
Rapport” has been used to refer to a range of positive psychological features of an interaction, including a situated sense of connection or affiliation between interactional partners, comfort, willingness to disclose or share sensitive information, motivation to please, and empathy. Rapport could potentially benefit survey participation and response quality by increasing respondents’ motivation to participate, disclose, or provide accurate infor…
Surveys
The effects of response option order and question order on self-rated health
An Interactional Model of the Call for Survey Participation
Previous research has proposed that the actions of sample members may provide encouraging, discouraging, or ambiguous interactional environments for interviewers soliciting participation in surveys. In our interactional model of the recruitment call that brings together the actions of interviewers and sample members, we examine features of actions that may contribute to an encouraging or discouraging environment in the opening moments of the call…
Acasi Gender-of-Interviewer Voice Effects on Reports to Questions about Sensitive * Behaviors Among Young Adults
Although previous research indicates that audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (ACASI) yields higher reports of threatening behaviors than interviewer-administered interviews, very few studies have examined the potential effect of the gender of the ACASI voice on survey reports. Because the voice in ACASI necessarily has a gender, it is important to understand whether using a voice that is perceived as male or female might further enhance th…
Questions for Surveys
We begin with a look back at the field to identify themes of recent research that we expect to continue to occupy researchers in the future. As part of this overview, we characterize the themes and topics examined in research about measurement and survey questions published in Public Opinion Quarterly in the past decade. We then characterize the field more broadly by highlighting topics that we expect to continue or to grow in importance, includi…
Are interactional behaviors exhibited when the self-reported health question is asked associated with health status
Calling for Participation
We draw on conversation analytic methods and research to explicate the interactional phenomenon of requesting in general and the specific case of requesting participation in survey interviews. Recent work on survey participation gives much attention to leverage-saliency theory but does not explore how the key concepts of this theory are exhibited in the actual unfolding interaction of interviewers and potential respondents. We examine interaction…
The Respondents Are All Above Average
This article is an investigation of compliments that follow respondents' performances on cognitive tasks in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study's 2004 wave of survey interviews. During training, interviewers learn that they are to give positive feedback to respondents but are not told exactly how they are to do this or how they are to handle the contingencies of respondents' varying performances. Our study shows that interviewers engage in the socia…
Conversation with a Purpose—or Conversation? Interaction in the Standardized Interview
This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Standardized Interview: The Case For and Against Survey Researchers Examine Interaction in the Interview Strategies for Studying Interaction Conclusion
Divorced Parents' Qualitative and Quantitative Reports of Children's Living Arrangements
We use data from a sample of divorced parents in Wisconsin (N = 1,392) to examine how parents describe their children's living arrangements. When the children spend substantial time in both parents' homes, both parents are less likely to use the phrase live with to describe living arrangements. When children spend most nights with their mother, mothers are more likely than fathers to state that the children live with their mother. Together, these…
The Science of Asking Questions
Survey methodologists have drawn on and contributed to research by cognitive psychologists, conversation analysts, and others to lay a foundation for the science of asking questions. Our discussion of this work is structured around the decisions that must be made for two common types of inquiries: questions about events or behaviors and questions that ask for evaluations or attitudes. The issues we review for behaviors include definitions, refere…
The Science of Asking Questions
Survey methodologists have drawn on and contributed to research by cognitive psychologists, conversation analysts, and others to lay a foundation for the science of asking questions. Our discussion of this work is structured around the decisions that must be made for two common types of inquiries: questions about events or behaviors and questions that ask for evaluations or attitudes. The issues we review for behaviors include definitions, refere…
Using Survey Participants to Estimate the Impact of Nonparticipation
Journal Article USING SURVEY PARTICIPANTS TO ESTIMATE THE IMPACT OF NONPARTICIPATION Get access I-FEN LIN, I-FEN LIN a graduate student in the department of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar NORA CATE SCHAEFFER NORA CATE SCHAEFFER a professor in the department of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Search for other works by this author on: Oxford …
Family Ties after Divorce
Toward a Sociology of Social Scientific Knowledge
When abstract, quantitative and generalizing sociologies are juxtaposed to qualitative sociologies, the relationship is often seen as complementary or competitive. Our purpose is to articulate a different type of relationship between abstract social scientific knowledge (as exemplified in Survey Research [SR]) and the form of concrete and particularized knowledge represented in ethnomethodological conversation analysis. SR, historically, represen…
Evaluating Race-of-Interviewer Effects In a National Survey
The present article attempts to overcome some of the problems involved in estimating race-of-interviewer effects in a nonexperimental national survey. Individual items as well as scales were examined, using General Social Survey (GSS) data. Race-of-interviewer effects large enough to justify the practice of matching interviewer and respondent race for interviews on racial topics were found for both black and white respondents. A few such effects …
Keeping the Gate
The authors employ a conversation-analytic perspective, using a haphazard sample of recorded phone calls, to analyze the sequential placement of and turn construction manner for recipients' declinations of the request to participate in a telephone survey interview. Recipients regularly respond very early in the opening of the phone call, just after the 'reason for the call' is stated. In constructing their declining turns, recipients are either p…
Questions for Surveys
We begin with a look back at the field to identify themes of recent research that we expect to continue to occupy researchers in the future. As part of this overview, we characterize the themes and topics examined in research about measurement and survey questions published in Public Opinion Quarterly in the past decade. We then characterize the field more broadly by highlighting topics that we expect to continue or to grow in importance, includi…
Calling for Participation
We draw on conversation analytic methods and research to explicate the interactional phenomenon of requesting in general and the specific case of requesting participation in survey interviews. Recent work on survey participation gives much attention to leverage-saliency theory but does not explore how the key concepts of this theory are exhibited in the actual unfolding interaction of interviewers and potential respondents. We examine interaction…
Hardly Ever or Constantly? Group Comparisons Using Vague Quantifier
Investigations of vague quantifiers—phrases like "very often," which express frequency in relative terms—have left the consequences of analyzing absolute or relative responses largely unexplored. This paper examines whether the choice of relative or absolute frequencies affects comparisons by race, sex, education, and age and the meaning of relative-frequency and relative-intensity phrases for these groups. Items analyzed are the frequency of exc…
Interviewing Practices, Conversational Practices, and Rapport
Rapport” has been used to refer to a range of positive psychological features of an interaction, including a situated sense of connection or affiliation between interactional partners, comfort, willingness to disclose or share sensitive information, motivation to please, and empathy. Rapport could potentially benefit survey participation and response quality by increasing respondents’ motivation to participate, disclose, or provide accurate infor…
Estimating Nonresponse and Response Bias
Although researchers are aware that nonresponse and response bias may compromise the accuracy of estimates from survey data, it is difficult to obtain estimates of these biases. In this article, we estimate nonresponse and response bias for a particular case—child support awards and payments. The sample of divorced resident and nonresident parents was drawn from Wisconsin court records and subsequently interviewed by telephone in 1987. The court …
Advances in the Science of Asking Questions
In recent decades, research about survey questions has emphasized decision-based approaches. Current research focuses on identifying and systematizing characteristics of questions that are key in researchers' decisions. We describe important classes of decisions and question characteristics: topic, type of question (e.g., event or behavior, evaluation or judgment), response dimension (e.g., occurrence, frequency, intensity), conceptualization and…
Events, Instruments, and Reporting Errors
Social scientists frequently lack methods for assessing the accuracy of survey responses about events and behaviors. And often they do not have a general framework for understanding or systematically analyzing the characteristics of experience, if any, that influence errors in reports about those events. In this validation study, structural features or characteristics of exchanging child support payments are examined to predict errors in reports …
Divorced Parents' Qualitative and Quantitative Reports of Children's Living Arrangements
We use data from a sample of divorced parents in Wisconsin (N = 1,392) to examine how parents describe their children's living arrangements. When the children spend substantial time in both parents' homes, both parents are less likely to use the phrase live with to describe living arrangements. When children spend most nights with their mother, mothers are more likely than fathers to state that the children live with their mother. Together, these…
An Interactional Model of the Call for Survey Participation
Previous research has proposed that the actions of sample members may provide encouraging, discouraging, or ambiguous interactional environments for interviewers soliciting participation in surveys. In our interactional model of the recruitment call that brings together the actions of interviewers and sample members, we examine features of actions that may contribute to an encouraging or discouraging environment in the opening moments of the call…
Acasi Gender-of-Interviewer Voice Effects on Reports to Questions about Sensitive * Behaviors Among Young Adults
Although previous research indicates that audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (ACASI) yields higher reports of threatening behaviors than interviewer-administered interviews, very few studies have examined the potential effect of the gender of the ACASI voice on survey reports. Because the voice in ACASI necessarily has a gender, it is important to understand whether using a voice that is perceived as male or female might further enhance th…
The Respondents Are All Above Average
This article is an investigation of compliments that follow respondents' performances on cognitive tasks in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study's 2004 wave of survey interviews. During training, interviewers learn that they are to give positive feedback to respondents but are not told exactly how they are to do this or how they are to handle the contingencies of respondents' varying performances. Our study shows that interviewers engage in the socia…
The Discovery of Grounded Uncertainty
Nora Cate Schaeffer, Elizabeth Thomson, The Discovery of Grounded Uncertainty: Developing Standardized Questions about Strength of Fertility Motivation, Sociological Methodology, Vol. 22 (1992), pp. 37-82
Are interactional behaviors exhibited when the self-reported health question is asked associated with health status
A General Social Survey Experiment in Generic Words
This paper analyses a question wording experiment from the 1980 General Social Survey. The experiment used two variants of a series of items that asked for evaluations of qualities for children. The experimental variation used the noun “child” consistently; the standard variation used the pronoun “he” and the noun “child.” There were no differences between the two wordings in the way the traits were evaluated. The lack of a question wording effec…
Public Attitudes Toward Data Sharing by Federal Agencies
Very little information exists concerning public attitudes on the topic of data sharing among Federal agencies. The most extensive information prior to 1995 comes from questions on several IRS surveys of taxpayers, from questions added to a series of Wisconsin surveys carried out in 1993-95, and from scattered other surveys reviewed by Blair (1995) for the National Academy of Sciences panels. From this review it is clear that the public is not we…
Principles of Justice in Judgments about Child Support
Studying judgments about child support awards provides an opportunity to extend justice theories, which have often focused on allocations of positive goods such as income. Because suggesting a child support award requires both deciding the amount of the cost to be divided between parents and making the division, an analysis of child support judgments must distinguish allocation rules and their operands. Approximately 1,000 respondents in a 1985 t…
Factors Associated with Interviewers’ Evaluations of Respondents’ Performance in Telephone Interviews
Interviewers’ postinterview evaluations of respondents’ performance (IEPs) are paradata, used to describe the quality of the data obtained from respondents. IEPs are driven by a combination of factors, including respondents’ and interviewers’ sociodemographic characteristics and what actually transpires during the interview. However, relatively few studies examine how IEPs are associated with features of the response process, including facets of …
The Influence of Social Conditions Across the Life Course on the Human Gut Microbiota
The addition of data on the gut microbiome to the WLS-and to other population based longitudinal studies of aging-is feasible, under the right conditions, and can generate innovative research on the relationship between social conditions and the gut microbiome
Two Experiments in Simplifying Response Categories
Two experiments compare simpler with more complex response categories in a telephone survey. The first experiment develops a method for predicting the effects of changing modifiers in labels for response categories. The experiment compares two response scales for rating the friendliness of parent-parent and parent-child relationships. The second experiment examines a flexible, self-documenting, procedure for recording answers to open questions ab…
Evaluating Race-of-Interviewer Effects In a National Survey
The present article attempts to overcome some of the problems involved in estimating race-of-interviewer effects in a nonexperimental national survey. Individual items as well as scales were examined, using General Social Survey (GSS) data. Race-of-interviewer effects large enough to justify the practice of matching interviewer and respondent race for interviews on racial topics were found for both black and white respondents. A few such effects …
A General Social Survey Experiment in Generic Words
This paper analyses a question wording experiment from the 1980 General Social Survey. The experiment used two variants of a series of items that asked for evaluations of qualities for children. The experimental variation used the noun “child” consistently; the standard variation used the pronoun “he” and the noun “child.” There were no differences between the two wordings in the way the traits were evaluated. The lack of a question wording effec…
Language, the Sexes, and Society
An Application of Item Response Theory to the Measurement of Depression
Studies of group differences in a subjective phenomenon are generally concerned with dzfferences in the degree of the trait. To determine differences in degree, however, it is first necessary to determine that the items used to measure the trait in the groups do not differ in kind. In other words, the items must be unbiased. Evaluating differences in kind and in degree requires the ability to scale questions and respondents. Item response theory …
Public Opinion about a Child Support Assurance System
The state of Wisconsin has begun implementing a new child support assurance system based on three innovations: (1) establishing support obligations equal to a proportion of the obligor's gross income; (2) automatically withholding support obligations from earnings; and (3) guaranteeing that eligible children receive no less than a publicly assured minimum benefit. Public support for these provisions was examined using the responses of a represent…
The Frequency and Intensity of Parental Conflict
Family Ties after Divorce
Principles of Justice in Judgments about Child Support
Studying judgments about child support awards provides an opportunity to extend justice theories, which have often focused on allocations of positive goods such as income. Because suggesting a child support award requires both deciding the amount of the cost to be divided between parents and making the division, an analysis of child support judgments must distinguish allocation rules and their operands. Approximately 1,000 respondents in a 1985 t…
Two Experiments in Simplifying Response Categories
Two experiments compare simpler with more complex response categories in a telephone survey. The first experiment develops a method for predicting the effects of changing modifiers in labels for response categories. The experiment compares two response scales for rating the friendliness of parent-parent and parent-child relationships. The second experiment examines a flexible, self-documenting, procedure for recording answers to open questions ab…
Estimating Nonresponse and Response Bias
Although researchers are aware that nonresponse and response bias may compromise the accuracy of estimates from survey data, it is difficult to obtain estimates of these biases. In this article, we estimate nonresponse and response bias for a particular case—child support awards and payments. The sample of divorced resident and nonresident parents was drawn from Wisconsin court records and subsequently interviewed by telephone in 1987. The court …
Hardly Ever or Constantly? Group Comparisons Using Vague Quantifier
Investigations of vague quantifiers—phrases like "very often," which express frequency in relative terms—have left the consequences of analyzing absolute or relative responses largely unexplored. This paper examines whether the choice of relative or absolute frequencies affects comparisons by race, sex, education, and age and the meaning of relative-frequency and relative-intensity phrases for these groups. Items analyzed are the frequency of exc…
The Discovery of Grounded Uncertainty
Nora Cate Schaeffer, Elizabeth Thomson, The Discovery of Grounded Uncertainty: Developing Standardized Questions about Strength of Fertility Motivation, Sociological Methodology, Vol. 22 (1992), pp. 37-82
Using Survey Participants to Estimate the Impact of Nonparticipation
Journal Article USING SURVEY PARTICIPANTS TO ESTIMATE THE IMPACT OF NONPARTICIPATION Get access I-FEN LIN, I-FEN LIN a graduate student in the department of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar NORA CATE SCHAEFFER NORA CATE SCHAEFFER a professor in the department of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Search for other works by this author on: Oxford …
Public Attitudes Toward Data Sharing by Federal Agencies
Very little information exists concerning public attitudes on the topic of data sharing among Federal agencies. The most extensive information prior to 1995 comes from questions on several IRS surveys of taxpayers, from questions added to a series of Wisconsin surveys carried out in 1993-95, and from scattered other surveys reviewed by Blair (1995) for the National Academy of Sciences panels. From this review it is clear that the public is not we…
Keeping the Gate
The authors employ a conversation-analytic perspective, using a haphazard sample of recorded phone calls, to analyze the sequential placement of and turn construction manner for recipients' declinations of the request to participate in a telephone survey interview. Recipients regularly respond very early in the opening of the phone call, just after the 'reason for the call' is stated. In constructing their declining turns, recipients are either p…
Toward a Sociology of Social Scientific Knowledge
When abstract, quantitative and generalizing sociologies are juxtaposed to qualitative sociologies, the relationship is often seen as complementary or competitive. Our purpose is to articulate a different type of relationship between abstract social scientific knowledge (as exemplified in Survey Research [SR]) and the form of concrete and particularized knowledge represented in ethnomethodological conversation analysis. SR, historically, represen…
Events, Instruments, and Reporting Errors
Social scientists frequently lack methods for assessing the accuracy of survey responses about events and behaviors. And often they do not have a general framework for understanding or systematically analyzing the characteristics of experience, if any, that influence errors in reports about those events. In this validation study, structural features or characteristics of exchanging child support payments are examined to predict errors in reports …
Standardization and Interaction in the Survey Interview
Standardization and tacit knowledge
This volume presents a theoretical and empirical inquiry into the interaction between interviewers and respondents in standardized research interviews. It concentrates on the interaction and conversational architecture at work in the interviewing process
The Science of Asking Questions
Survey methodologists have drawn on and contributed to research by cognitive psychologists, conversation analysts, and others to lay a foundation for the science of asking questions. Our discussion of this work is structured around the decisions that must be made for two common types of inquiries: questions about events or behaviors and questions that ask for evaluations or attitudes. The issues we review for behaviors include definitions, refere…
Conversation with a Purpose—or Conversation? Interaction in the Standardized Interview
This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Standardized Interview: The Case For and Against Survey Researchers Examine Interaction in the Interview Strategies for Studying Interaction Conclusion
Divorced Parents' Qualitative and Quantitative Reports of Children's Living Arrangements
We use data from a sample of divorced parents in Wisconsin (N = 1,392) to examine how parents describe their children's living arrangements. When the children spend substantial time in both parents' homes, both parents are less likely to use the phrase live with to describe living arrangements. When children spend most nights with their mother, mothers are more likely than fathers to state that the children live with their mother. Together, these…
The Respondents Are All Above Average
This article is an investigation of compliments that follow respondents' performances on cognitive tasks in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study's 2004 wave of survey interviews. During training, interviewers learn that they are to give positive feedback to respondents but are not told exactly how they are to do this or how they are to handle the contingencies of respondents' varying performances. Our study shows that interviewers engage in the socia…
Calling for Participation
We draw on conversation analytic methods and research to explicate the interactional phenomenon of requesting in general and the specific case of requesting participation in survey interviews. Recent work on survey participation gives much attention to leverage-saliency theory but does not explore how the key concepts of this theory are exhibited in the actual unfolding interaction of interviewers and potential respondents. We examine interaction…
Questions for Surveys
We begin with a look back at the field to identify themes of recent research that we expect to continue to occupy researchers in the future. As part of this overview, we characterize the themes and topics examined in research about measurement and survey questions published in Public Opinion Quarterly in the past decade. We then characterize the field more broadly by highlighting topics that we expect to continue or to grow in importance, includi…
Psychology (38 obras) · Social Psychology (23 obras) · Sociology (22 obras) · Computer Science (19 obras) · Social Psychology (19 obras) · Survey Methodology and Nonresponse (18 obras) · Interview (14 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Mathematics (10 obras) · Applied Psychology (9 obras)