I mentioned the R-Indicators in a recent post. In addition to the article in Survey Methodology, they also have a very useful website. The website includes a number of papers and presentations on the topic.
One of the chapters in a recent book on surveying hard-to-reach populations looks at "targeting and tailoring" survey designs. The chapter references this paper on the use of the terms among those who design health communication. I thought the article was an interesting one. They start by saying that "one way to classify message strategies like tailoring is by the level of specificity with which characteristics of the target audience are reflected in the the communication." That made sense. There is likely a continuum of specificity ranging from complete non-differentiation across units to nearly individualized. But then the authors break that continuum and try to define a "fundamental" difference between tailoring and targeting. They say targeting is for some subgroup while tailoring is to the characteristics of the individual. That sounds good, but at least for surveys, I'm not sure the distinction holds. In survey design, what would constitute
In some respects, the R-index is contradictory to your fraction of missing data. For example, more auxiliary data can lead to lower R-index (bad) and lower fraction of missing data (good). Do you see a middle ground approach, despite how different they are in theory, assumptions, and implementation?
ReplyDeleteI can only say something very general on this question at the moment.
ReplyDeleteBoth of these measures are model-dependent, that is, they are only as good as the model they choose for their implementation. As a result, we'll need multiple views of the problem. In addition, we'll be uncertain of the results produced by either statistic. So basing actions on those statistics may need to be tempered in some fashion. If multiple statistics converge to the same solution, we should probably feel pretty good about that solution.
I hope to address these questions. I'm working on it.