[gov3009-l] Gov 3009 February 5: King

This week's speaker at the Gov 3009 seminar is Gary King, speaking on "Enhancing the Validity and Cross-cultural Comparability of Survey Research." The full paper can be found at: http://gking.harvard.edu/preprints.shtml#vign Abstract: We offer a new approach to writing survey questions and a new statistical model that together at least partially ameliorate two long-standing problems in survey research. The first is how to measure complicated concepts, such as freedom, health, political efficacy, pornography, etc., that researchers know how to define clearly only with reference to examples. The second problem is when different respondents interpret identical survey questions in incomparable ways, as can occur when comparing respondents in different countries speaking different languages, but it also occurs frequently with different groups in the same country. Our approach to these problems is to ask respondents for self-assessments of the concept being measured along with assessments, on the same scale, of each of several hypothetical individuals described by short vignettes. The actual (but not necessarily reported) levels for the people in the vignettes are, by the design of the survey, invariant over respondents and thus provide anchors for our statistical model to transform the self-assessments to a comparable scale. With analysis, simulations, and real surveys in several countries, we show how ignoring these problems can lead to the wrong substantive conclusions and how our approach can fix them. Our methods build on insights from application-specific research on voters and legislators in political science to produce a more general measurement device. You may also be interested in the Anchoring Vignettes web site, http://gking.harvard.edu/vign/, which includes information about conferences on the subject, a FAQ, software, example vignettes, and other materials.) This is joint work with Christopher J.L. Murray, Joshua A. Salomon, and Ajay Tandon. The seminar meets at noon in Room 22, Center for Basic Research in Social Sciences (CBRSS, 34 Kirkland St., this is the yellow building across the street from William James Hall). Contact information, previous presentations, and the spring schedule may be found at the course web site: http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~gov3009/. Lunch is provided. To join the gov3009 mailing list, send e-mail to gov3009-l-request(a)fas.harvard.edu with the following text message: subscribe end Questions? Please contact the workshop coordinator, Liz Stuart, at stuart(a)stat.harvard.edu