Survey Methods Musings

A key question that face-to-face surveys must answer is how to balance local control against the need for centralized direction. This is an interesting issue to me. I've worked on face-to-face surveys for a long time now, and I have had discussion about this issue with many people. "Local control" means that interviewers make the key decisions about which cases to call and when to call them. They have local knowledge that helps them to optimize these decisions. For example. if they see people at home, they know that is a good time to make an attempts. They learn people's work schedules, etc. This has been the traditional practice. This may be because before computers, there was no other option. The "centralized" approach says that the central office can summarize the data across many call attempts, cases, and interviewers and come up with  an optimal policy. This centralized control might serve some quality purpose, as in our efforts here to promote more...

The term "big data" was meant to cover a wide variety of types of data. Surveys were left out of the definition. Bob Groves attempted to remedy this by coining the terms "organic" and "designed" data. These terms were meant to capture the strengths and weaknesses of big data, on the one hand, and survey data, on the other hand. Organic data are not generated for research purposes, but usually inexpensive to obtain (but not necessarily cheap to analyze). Survey data are designed for research but are often expensive to obtain. I'm finding that these terms might get in the way of thinking about some actual problems. For instance, travel surveys are looking at combining survey data with GPS data. GPS data can be large and complex, i.e. "big data." On the other hand, features of these data are designed by the researchers in travel studies. That is, the researchers ask persons to carry a GPS device or download an app to their smartphones. These d...

The Director of the Census Bureau, John Thompson, recently blogged about a field test for the 2020 Decennial Census Nonresponse Follow-up. They are testing a number of new features, including the use of smartphones in data collection. I've been working with GPS data from smartphones used by field interviewers. The data are complex, but may offer new insights into interviewer travel. Think of travel as a broad concept -- it's not just an expense or efficiency issue. The order in which calls are made may also relate to field outcomes like contact and response rates. Perhaps these GPS data can help us understand how interviewers currently make decisions about how to work their sample. For example, do they move past sampled housing units when they first arrive to the area segment? Is this action associated with higher contact rates? Of course, travel is also an expense or efficiency issue. I wouldn't want pushing for more efficient travel to interfere with other aspects o...