Whether questions and answers are transmitted between interviewer and respondent by visual or aural communication can affect the responses given. We hypothesise that communication channel can affect either the respondent's understanding of the question or the tendency to satisfice. These effects...

This study examines the phenomenon of nonresponse in the first wave of a refresher sample (subsample H) of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). Our first step is to link additional (commercial) microgeographic data on the immediate neighborhoods of the households visited by...

There is an increasing interest among social scientists in merging survey data with administrative records from social security institutions. Record linkage represents one way to combine different sources using a unique identifier such as the Social Security number. The informed consent of the...

Social desirability is a major problem in survey research. One way of handling the problem is to measure social desirability and to incorporate it into the statistical analysis. There are different techniques of measuring social desirability. We investigate and compare the performance of the...

This paper demonstrates how quality of life can be measured by plain text in a representative survey, the German Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP). Furthermore, the paper shows that problems that are difficult to monitor, especially problems like the state of the European Union, long-term...

Respondent biases introduce measurement error into household statistics. There are two components of respondent bias in household surveys: asymmetric information between proxy respondent and the individual on whom they report and aggregation bias when a proxy respondent reports on a...

FamData is a database covering family businesses and non-family businesses across various size classes and branches containing structural and financial information. The ifo Institute assembled a business panel with executives from almost 4,000 companies. In addition to the “hard” business...

Large representative surveys are using mixed methods to an ever-increasing degree. Biomarkers, register data, and experiments, for example, provide different types of data that can be linked with survey data. The use of qualitative interviewing of participants in longitudinal surveys is still...

It is common practice to adapt the format of a question to the mode of data collection. Multi-coded questions in self-completion and face-to-face modes tend to be transformed for telephone into a series of 'yes/no' questions. Questions with response scales are often branched in telephone...

Mixed mode designs are increasingly important in surveys and large longitudinal studies are progressively moving to or considering such a design. In this context our knowledge regarding the impact of mixing modes on data quality indicators in longitudinal studies is sparse. This study tries to...