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:
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end
Questions? Please contact the workshop coordinator, Liz Stuart, at
stuart(a)stat.harvard.edu