Big Data and Survey Data

I missed Dr. Groves blog post on this topic. It is an interesting perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of each data source. His solution is to "blend" data from both sources to compensate for the weaknesses of each. Dr. Couper spoke along similar lines at the ESRA conference last year.

An important takeaway from both of these is that surveys have an important place in the future. Surveys gather, relative to big data, rich data on individuals that allow the development and testing of models that may be used with big data. Or provide benchmarks for estimates from big data for which the characteristics of the population are only vaguely known.

In any event, I'm not worried that surveys or even probability sampling have outlived their usefulness. But it is good to chart a course for the future that will keep survey folks relevant to these pressing problems.

Comments

Tailoring vs. Targeting

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 ...

"Responsive Design" and "Adaptive Design"

My dissertation was entitled "Adaptive Survey Design to Reduce Nonresponse Bias." I had been working for several years on "responsive designs" before that. As I was preparing my dissertation, I really saw "adaptive" design as a subset of responsive design. Since then, I've seen both terms used in different places. As both terms are relatively new, there is likely to be confusion about the meanings. I thought I might offer my understanding of the terms, for what it's worth. The term "responsive design" was developed by Groves and Heeringa (2006) . They coined the term, so I think their definition is the one that should be used. They defined "responsive design" in the following way: 1. Preidentify a set of design features that affect cost and error tradeoffs. 2. Identify indicators for these costs and errors. Monitor these during data collection. 3. Alter the design features based on pre-identified decision rules based on ...

What is Data Quality, and How to Enhance it in Research

We often talk about “data quality” or “data integrity” when we are discussing the collection or analysis of one type of data or another. Yet, the definition of these terms might be unclear, or they may vary across different contexts. In any event, the terms are somewhat abstract -- which can make it difficult, in practice, to improve. That is, we need to know what we are describing with those terms, before we can improve them. Over the last two years, we have been developing a course on Total Data Quality , soon to be available on Coursera. We start from an error classification scheme adopted by survey methodology many years ago. Known as the “Total Survey Error” perspective, it focuses on the classification of errors into measurement and representation dimensions. One goal of our course is to expand this classification scheme from survey data to other types of data. The figure shows the classification scheme as we have modified it to include both survey data and organic f...

Survey Methods Musings

Search This Blog