Suchergebnisse

Felix Wolter untersucht die Problematik sogenannter heikler Fragen in Survey-Interviews und damit ein Thema, das die Surveymethodologie seit den 1930er Jahren beschäftigt. Konkret geht es um die "Randomized Response-Technik" (RRT), einen innovativen Vorschlag zur Vermeidung von Antwortverzerrungen bei sensiblen Fragen. Der Text gibt im ersten Teil einen Überblick über den aktuellen Forschungsstand zum Thema heikle Fragen sowie der RRT und erörtert handlungstheoretische Erklärungsangebote zur Erklärung des Befragtenverhaltens. Im zweiten Teil präsentiert der Autor empirische Analysen einer experimentellen Validierungsstudie, in der die Antworten von Befragten auf heikle Fragen mit extern validierten wahren Werten verglichen werden. Dabei ist vor allem die Frage entscheidend, wie gut die RRT im Vergleich zur konventionellen, direkten Befragung im Interview abschneidet..

This paper presents empirical evidence on a recent advancement of the item count technique (ICT, a survey technique for asking sensitive questions), namely, the person count technique (PCT; Grant, Moon, & Gleason, 2014). PCT utilizes person lists instead of lists of filler questions, as is the case in the classic ICT design. This simplifies the questioning procedure, but leads to some methodological challenges such as floor and ceiling effects. The main part of this paper presents empirical evidence stemming from an experimental postal survey in Germany (N = 580) investigating how well PCT performs as compared to standard direct questioning (DQ) with regard to alleviating misreporting for questions on attitudes towards refugees. PCT prevalence estimates for hostile attitudes towards refugees are significantly higher than DQ estimates for one item, and non-significantly higher for three items. Although not consistently significant, the differences are substantial, amounting to a threefold increase of the proportion of respondents expressing negative attitudes towards refugees. Even though the findings are not unequivocally in favor of PCT, this new ICT variant still deserves consideration in the future and warrants further development. Specifically, more knowledge is required with respect to its statistical properties and the best practices of its implementation.

Many surveys contain sensitive questions, for example, questions on sexuality, substance abuse, self-reported delinquency, or attitudes to foreigners. When answering such questions in survey interviews, many respondents do not respond truthfully and overreport positively connoted behaviors or attitudes (e.g., having voted in elections) and underreport negatively connoted ones (e.g., shoplifting). Also, many respondents refuse to answer at all, especially to questions on income. These phenomena are called social desirability bias and cause survey data to be not valid. We report the planning, design, process, difficulties, and results from a research project in which the item sum technique (IST) was experimentally tested against standard direct questioning (DQ) to tackle the problem of social desirability bias. The IST is a special questioning technique that, by adding random noise to the respondents' answers, anonymizes the interview situation and therefore raises respondent protection. In our project, IST was compared to DQ for the income question and a question on self-reported alcohol consumption. A CATI (computer-assisted telephone interviewing) survey (N = 499) in Mainz, Germany, provides the empirical data. The key findings show that nonresponse to the income question is reduced considerably by IST. Regarding self-reported alcohol consumption, the slightly higher estimates in IST format (as compared to DQ) fail to be statistically significant for the whole sample. For male and for higher educated respondents, however, IST yields significantly higher estimates of self-reported alcohol consumption.

Several special questioning techniques have been developed in order to counteract misreporting to sensitive survey questions, for example, on criminal behavior. However, doubts have been raised concerning their validity and practical value as well as the strategy of testing their validity using the "more-is-better" assumption in comparative survey experiments. This is because such techniques can be prone to generating false positive estimates, that is, counting "innocent" respondents as "guilty" ones. This article investigates the occurrence of false positive estimates by comparing direct questioning, the crosswise model (CM), and the item count technique (ICT). We analyze data from two online surveys (N = 2,607 and 3,203) carried out in Germany and Switzerland. Respondents answered three questions regarding traits for which it is known that their prevalence in reality is zero. The results show that CM suffers more from false positive estimates than ICT. CM estimates amount to up to 15 percent for a given true value of zero. The mean of the ICT estimates is not significantly different from zero. We further examine factors causing the biased estimates of CM and show that speeding through the questionnaire (random answering) and problems with the measurement procedure—namely regarding the unrelated questions—are responsible. Our findings suggest that CM is problematic and should not be used or evaluated without the possibility of accounting for false positives. For ICT, the issue is less severe.

We analyze opposition towards Covid-19 containment measures by assessing the role of self-interest, sociotropic threat, political predispositions, and infection rates. We base our analyses on two waves of survey data from Germany ( N = 3258/3201). Our measure of self-interest includes objective indicators for and subjective perceptions of individual threat from containment measures in the economic sphere and in the family and health domains. We also analyze whether the role of self-interest changes as the pandemic proceeds in its course. Our results show that self-interest plays a limited role in explaining attitudes about containment measures. More important are broader political predispositions such as trust in institutions, including the government. Attitudes are unrelated to local rates of infection or death. This pattern has remained stable over the course of the pandemic. We discuss the relevance of these findings with respect to the general enforceability of public policies that serve collective goals, such as efforts to limit climate change. Parts of the population may be reluctant to comply with these public policies even if the associated costs to the individual are small. This is less because of people's personal circumstances, and more because of their opposition to government interventions as such.

Trust matters more than self-interest: That is the result of an online survey we conducted among roughly 4,800 participants in April and May 2020. Individual attitudes towards easing restrictions to contain the coronavirus pandemic are not primarily shaped by whether people fear economic or family-related consequences for themselves or for society. Rather, it is perceived infringements on basic rights that motivate respondents to demand that restrictions be lifted. Respondents from East Germany and those who tend not to trust public institutions in the first place are especially critical of the containment measures. The discussion about easing restrictions, therefore, is not so much about the varying degrees to which individuals are affected, but rather about the degree of trust in public institutions generally. ; Vertrauen ist wichtiger als Eigeninteresse: Das zeigt eine OnlineBefragung, die wir von April bis Mai 2020 unter knapp 4800 Teilnehmenden durchgeführt haben. Die Haltung zur Lockerung pandemiebedingter Beschränkungen wird weniger dadurch bestimmt, ob jemand daraus wirtschaftliche oder familiäre Folgen für sich selbst oder die Gesellschaft befürchtet. Vielmehr bringen wahrgenommene Grundrechtseinschränkungen die Befragten dazu, Lockerungen zu fordern. Befragte aus dem Osten Deutschlands und solche, die ohnehin ein geringes Vertrauen in staatliche Institutionen haben, sehen die Eindämmungsmaßnahmen besonders kritisch. Bei der Lockerungsdiskussion geht es also weniger um unterschiedlich starke individuelle Betroffenheit als um das Vertrauen in staatliche Institutionen.

Vertrauen ist wichtiger als Eigeninteresse: Das zeigt eine OnlineBefragung, die wir von April bis Mai 2020 unter knapp 4800 Teilnehmenden durchgeführt haben. Die Haltung zur Lockerung pandemiebedingter Beschränkungen wird weniger dadurch bestimmt, ob jemand daraus wirtschaftliche oder familiäre Folgen für sich selbst oder die Gesellschaft befürchtet. Vielmehr bringen wahrgenommene Grundrechtseinschränkungen die Befragten dazu, Lockerungen zu fordern. Befragte aus dem Osten Deutschlands und solche, die ohnehin ein geringes Vertrauen in staatliche Institutionen haben, sehen die Eindämmungsmaßnahmen besonders kritisch. Bei der Lockerungsdiskussion geht es also weniger um unterschiedlich starke individuelle Betroffenheit als um das Vertrauen in staatliche Institutionen. ; Trust matters more than self-interest: That is the result of an online survey we conducted among roughly 4,800 participants in April and May 2020. Individual attitudes towards easing restrictions to contain the coronavirus pandemic are not primarily shaped by whether people fear economic or family-related consequences for themselves or for society. Rather, it is perceived infringements on basic rights that motivate respondents to demand that restrictions be lifted. Respondents from East Germany and those who tend not to trust public institutions in the first place are especially critical of the containment measures. The discussion about easing restrictions, therefore, is not so much about the varying degrees to which individuals are affected, but rather about the degree of trust in public institutions generally.

"Surveys often contain sensitive questions, that is, questions about private, illegal, or socially undesirable behavior. When asked directly in standard survey modes, respondents tend to underreport these behaviors, yielding biased results. One method that promises more valid estimates than direct questioning (DQ) is the item count technique (ICT). In this paper, methodological benefits and disadvantages of the ICT, as compared to DQ, are empirically evaluated with regard to questions on self-reported delinquency. We present findings from a face-to-face survey of 552 respondents who had been convicted under criminal law prior to the survey. The results show that, first, subjective measures of survey quality such as trust in anonymity or willingness to respond are not affected positively by the ICT with the exception that interviewers feel less uncomfortable asking sensitive questions in ICT mode than in DQ mode. Second, all prevalence estimates of self-reported delinquent behaviors are significantly higher in ICT than in DQ mode. Third, a regression model on determinants of response behavior indicates that the effect of the ICT on response validity varies by gender. All in all, our results are in favor of the ICT. This technique is a promising alternative to other special questioning techniques such as the much more complicated randomized response technique (RRT)." (author's abstract)