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Europe and USA have been the cradle of methodology. Consequently most of the contemporary methodological knowledge has been invented by Western academic culture. Throughout the twentieth century this indigenous culture has been transformed into a type of general knowledge, and social science methodology has become one of the most globalized knowledge. However the limits of globalization are evident in many fields, from economy to politics, from marketing to culture and social life. Methodology is not free from these limits. There is an emerging need for finding postcolonial methodologies and making culturally flexible contemporary research methods. The author explores the proposal for a glocal methodology, the possibility of thinking (methodologically) global and acting (methodologically) local, and its ambiguity. Finally, indigenous methodologies and participatory action research are questioned as effective ways out of methodological colonialism.

This article describes and discusses the new generation of methodological responses to measuring democracy and related issues generated by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). V-Dem is distinct in several regards in addition to its unique level of disaggregation, by the combination of: historical data extending back to 1900 and for a large selection among them to 1789 for many countries in the world; use of multiple, independent coders for each evaluative question; inter-coder reliability tests incorporated into a custom designed Bayesian item-response theory measurement model; provision of confidence bounds for all point estimates associated with expert-coded questions as well as for all indices; multiple indices reflecting varying theories of democracy; fully transparent aggregation procedures; and that all data are made freely available, including original coder-level judgments (exclusive of any personal identifying information).

Units sampled from finite populations typically come with different inclusion probabilities. Together with additional preprocessing steps of the raw data, this yields unequal sampling weights of the observations. Whenever indicators are estimated from such complex samples, the corresponding sampling weights have to be taken into account. In addition, many indicators suffer from a strong influence of outliers, which are a common problem in real-world data. The R package laeken is an object-oriented toolkit for the estimation of indicators from complex survey samples via standard or robust methods. In particular the most widely used social exclusion and poverty indicators are implemented in the package. A general calibrated bootstrap method to estimate the variance of indicators for common survey designs is included as well. Furthermore, the package contains synthetically generated close-to-reality data for the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions and the Structure of Earnings Survey, which are used in the code examples throughout the paper. Even though the paper is focused on showing the functionality of package laeken, it also provides a brief mathematical description of the implemented indicator methodology.

Government policies and behavior exert a strong influence on the investment climate through their impact on costs, risks and barriers to competition. Key factors affecting the investment climate through their impact on costs are: corruption, taxes, the regulatory burden and extent of red tape in general, factor markets (labor, intermediate materials and capital), the quality of infrastructure, technological and innovation support, and the availability and cost of finance. While the investment climate surveys are quite useful in identifying major issues and bottlenecks as perceived by firms, the data collected is also meant to provide the basic information for an econometric assessment of the impact or contribution of the investment climate (IC) variables on productivity. We believe that improving the investment climate (IC) is a key policy instrument to promote economic growth and to mitigate the institutional, legal, economic and social factors that are constraining the convergence of per capita income and labor productivity of Turkey relative to more developed countries. For that, we need to identify the main investment climate variables that affect economic performance measures like total factor productivity, employment, wages, exports and foreign direct investment and this is the main goal of this paper. In turn, that quantified impact is used in the advocacy for, and design of, investment-climate reforms.

Objectives: The COVID-19 Psychological Research Consortium (C19PRC) Study aims to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the adult population in multiple countries. This paper describes the third wave of the UK survey (the 'parent' strand of the Consortium) during July-August 2020. Methods: Adults (N=2025) who participated in the baseline and/or first follow-up surveys were reinvited to participate in this survey, which assessed: (1) COVID-19 related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours; (2) the occurrence of common mental disorders; as well as the role of (3) psychological factors and (4) social and political attitudes, in influencing the public's response to the pandemic. Weights were calculated using a survey raking algorithm to ensure that the cross-sectional sample is nationally representative in terms of gender, age, and household income, and representative of the baseline sample characteristics for household composition, ethnicity, urbanicity and born/raised in UK. Results: 1166 adults (57.6% of baseline participants) provided full interviews at Wave 3. The raking procedure successfully re-balanced the cross-sectional sample to within 1% of population estimates across selected socio-demographic characteristics. Conclusion: This paper demonstrates the strength of the C19PRC Study data to facilitate and stimulate interdisciplinary research addressing important public health questions relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

BACKGROUND: Respiratory disorders are important contributors to disease burden across the world. The aim is to assess the proportionate burden of types of respiratory diseases and their seasonal patterns in India we are performing a field study. The present report describes methodological aspects of a respiratory disease point prevalence survey from India. METHODS: A total of 4108 chest physicians were invited. Acceptance was received from 420 sites. Chest physicians were classified according to location of practice one as medical college, district government hospital, private hospital, and private clinics. Qualifications of practicing chest physicians were postgraduate in chest medicine, including Doctorate of Medicine (68.4%), diploma in chest medicine (22.1%), and Postgraduate in Medicine (9.5%). The study questionnaire was designed to record demographic data, comorbidities, risk factors, and respiratory conditions based on ICD-10. RESULTS: A total of 366 sites provided baseline data, and the response rate of recruitment of the study sites was 8.9% in the baseline phase. However, government and private medical colleges, as well as government and private hospitals across India, were part of recruitment of respiratory patients for this survey. CONCLUSIONS: It is feasible to conduct a large multisite study to assess respiratory disease burden. Challenges include low response rate and logistic issues.

Objectives: The C19PRC Study aims to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the adult population of the UK, Republic of Ireland, and Spain. This paper describes the conduct of the first two waves of the UK survey (the 'parent' strand of the Consortium) during March-April 2020. Methods: A longitudinal, internet panel survey was designed to assess: (1) COVID-19 related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours; (2) the occurrence of common mental health disorders; as well as the role of (3) psychological factors and (4) social and political attitudes, in influencing the public's response to the pandemic. Quota sampling (age, sex, and household income) was used to recruit a nationally representative sample of adults. Results: 2025 adults were recruited at baseline, and 1406 were followed-up one-month later (69.4% response rate). The baseline sample was representative of the UK population in relation to economic activity, ethnicity, and household composition. Attrition was predicted by key socio-demographic characteristics, and an inverse probability weighting procedure was employed to ensure the follow-up sample was representative of the baseline sample. Conclusion: The C19PRC Study data has strong generalisability to facilitate and stimulate interdisciplinary research on important public health questions relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

All social surveys suffer from different types of errors, of which one of the most studied is non-response bias. Non-response bias is a systematic error that occurs because individuals differ in their accessibility and propensity to participate in a survey according to their own characteristics as well as those from the survey itself. The extent of the problem heavily depends on the correlation between response mechanisms and key survey variables. However, non-response bias is difficult to measure or to correct for due to the lack of relevant data about the whole target population or sample. In this paper, non-response follow-up surveys are considered as a possible source of information about non-respondents. Non-response follow-ups, however, suffer from two methodological issues: they themselves operate through a response mechanism that can cause potential non-response bias, and they pose a problem of comparability of measure, mostly because the survey design differs between main survey and non-response follow-up. In order to detect possible bias, the survey variables included in non-response surveys have to be related to the mechanism of participation, but not be sensitive to measurement effects due to the different designs. Based on accumulated experience of four similar non-response follow-ups, we studied the survey variables that fulfill these conditions. We differentiated socio-demographic variables that are measurement-invariant but have a lower correlation with non-response and variables that measure attitudes, such as trust, social participation, or integration in the public sphere, which are more sensitive to measurement effects but potentially more appropriate to account for the non-response mechanism. Our results show that education level, work status, and living alone, as well as political interest, satisfaction with democracy, and trust in institutions are pertinent variables to include in non-response follow-ups of general social surveys.

Diese Dissertation betrachtet verschiedene Schritte einer sozialwissenschaftlichen Erhebung zur Integration Geflüchteter in Deutschland. Anhand von vier Zeitschriftenartikeln wird eine neuartige Strategie, um eine Zufallsstichprobe von Geflüchteten in Deutschland zu ziehen, besprochen, die Folgen fehlender muttersprachlicher Übersetzungen von Fragebögen analysiert, latente Konstrukte auf Vergleichbarkeit getestet und Fragen ökonomischer Integration in sich verändernden Migrationsregimen diskutiert. Der erste Artikel befasst sich mit einer sequentiellen Ziehungsstrategie für Zufallsstichproben. Diese ermöglicht eine zeitnahe Erhebung von Zuwanderern in Zeiten hoher Immigration, da Registerdaten Migranten nur mit zeitlicher Verzögerung umfassend abdecken. Im zweiten Artikel wird gezeigt, dass fehlende muttersprachliche Übersetzungen von Umfragen die Item-Nonresponse erhöhen. Auch die Bereitstellung von Audio-Aufnahmen kann diesem Effekt nicht entgegenwirken. Im dritten Artikel wird die Vergleichbarkeit latenter Konstrukte in multikulturellen und multisprachlichen Erhebungen am Beispiel von Vorstellungen zu demokratischen Systemen untersucht. Messinvarianztests deuten darauf hin, dass Vorstellungen von Demokratie über verschiedene Herkunftsländer und Sprachen nicht vergleichbar sind. Der letzte Artikel beschäftigt sich mit der ökonomischen Integration Geflüchteter und argumentiert, dass diese auf institutioneller Ebene betrachtet werden muss. Fixed-Effects- Regressionsanalysen kombiniert mit einem exakten Matching führen zu der Schlussfolgerung, dass sichere Aufenthaltstitel und die Teilnahme an Integrationskursen bei Geflüchteten in Deutschland zu einer erhöhten Anstrengung führt Zugang zum Arbeitsmarkt zu bekommen. ; This dissertation looks at the different steps in the process of conducting a survey on refugees living in Germany and discusses key focal points of integration research. In four different articles, I discuss the novel sampling strategy used in a survey of refugees, analyze the effects of missing questionnaire languages, test latent constructs for measurement invariance, and discuss the analysis of economic integration in a changing migration regime. In the first article, I propose a sequential sampling strategy to sample refugees in times of high immigration. In the second article, I show that the lack of questionnaires in a respondent's mother tongue increases item nonresponse. Providing additional audio recordings of the questions does not diminish this effect. In the third article, I use conceptions of democracy as a case study to show that latent constructs in multi-cultural and multi-linguistic surveys face specific challenges and limitations in their comparability. By employing tests for measurement invariance, my results show that conceptions of democracy are likely not comparable across countries of origin or across languages. The fourth and last article looks at the economic integration of refugees. In it, I propose that integration trajectories have to be observed within the specific institutional settings in which they take place. Fixed-effects regression analyses combined with a coarsened exact matching lead to the conclusion that a secure residence permit and participation in integration classes lead to increasing investments in future labor market access of refugees in Germany.

Facing a rapidly ageing population, Singapore is presented with urgent policy challenges. Yet there is very little data on the economic, health and family circumstances of older Singaporeans. In response, the Centre for Research on the Economics of Ageing (CREA) at Singapore Management University has been collecting monthly data on a panel of Singaporeans aged between 50 and 70 years. We detail the methodology by which the Singapore Life Panel® (SLP) was constructed using a population-representative sampling frame from the Singapore Department of Statistics. Contact was made with 25,000 households through postal, phone and in-person canvassing. More than 15,200 respondents from over 11,500 households enrolled in the panel. Comparisons between SLP and official statistics show close matching on age, sex, marital status, ethnicity, education, labor force status, income and expenditure. This suggests that the panel is a representative of Singapore's elderly population. Monthly surveys continue to be administered over the internet, supplemented by phone and in-person outreach to ensure the panel remains representative and hence reliable for informing policy makers. Response rates are remarkably stable at over 8000 per month. The SLP contains rich data on demographics, health status, socio-economic indicators, contact with government programmes and subjective perceptions and is likely to be a key resource for economic research into ageing in Singapore.

This paper proposes a method to simultaneously estimate both measurement and nonresponse errors for attitudinal and behavioural questions. The method uses a Multi-Trait Multi-Method (MTMM) approach, which is commonly used to estimate the reliability and validity of survey questions. The classic MTMM model is in this paper extended to include the effects of measurement bias and longitudinal nonresponse. Measurement and nonresponse errors are expressed on a common metric in this model, so that their relative sizes can be assessed over the course of a panel study. Using an example about political trust from the Dutch LISS panel, we show that measurement problems lead to both small errors and small biases, that dropout in the panel study does not lead to errors or bias, and that therefore, measurement is a more important source of both error and bias than nonresponse.

The World Values Survey (WVS) is an international research program developed to assess the impact of values stability or change over time on the social, political and economic development of countries and societies. It started in 1981 by Ronald Inglehart and his team, since then has involved more than 100 world societies and turned into the largest non-commercial cross-national empirical time-series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed on a global scale. The article consists of a few sections differing by the focus. The authors begin with the description of survey methodology and organization management that both ensure cross-national and cross-regional comparative character of the study (the survey is implemented using the same questionnaire, a face-to-face mode of interviews, and the same sample type in every country). The next part of the article presents a short overview of the project history and comparative surveys' time-series (so called "waves" periods between two and four years long during which collection of data in several dozens of countries using one same questionnaire is taking place; such waves are conducted every five years). Here the authors describe every wave of the WVS mentioning coordination and management activities that were determined by the extension of the project thematically and geographically. After that the authors identify the key features of the WVS in the New Independent States and mention some of the results of the study conducted in NIS countries in 1990-2014, such as high level of uncertainty in the choice of ideological preferences; rapid growth of declared religiosity; observed gap between the declared values and actual facts of social life, etc. The final section of the article summarizes the findings and key publications of the project for its data is widely used to analyse economic and political development, religious beliefs, gender equality, social capital, subjective well-being and many other issues of social development and values change in the world.

The present dissertation explores language effects in a comparative survey i.e. to what extent linguistic diversity affects equivalence in a comparative survey. This is done by studying three different dimensions on the challenges of designing a comparative multilingual survey: survey translation, linguistically diverse countries and bilingualism. Guidelines in survey translation do not link assessment criteria and measurement equivalence testing. I propose a systematic procedure to compare versions of a question in different languages before fieldwork which establishes that link. In linguistically diverse countries, survey instruments are translated into more than one language, equivalence is commonly assumed, not tested. I test for invariance distinguishing the response and cognitive processes to a survey question. Finally, I study measurement equivalence within an individual in two languages for political constructs (bilingualism), challenging current methodological approaches by bringing latent variable models. In each dimension, findings aim to contribute to improving comparative survey methodology. ; Esta tesis explora los efectos del lenguaje en una encuesta comparativa: en qué medida la diversidad lingüística afecta la equivalencia de los datos mediante el estudio de tres dimensiones: la traducción de encuestas, países lingüísticamente diversos y el bilingüismo. Las directrices actuales en la traducción de encuestas no vinculan los criterios de evaluación con un test de equivalencia. Se propone un procedimiento sistemático para comparar las versiones de una pregunta que establece dicho vínculo, en diferentes idiomas antes del trabajo de campo. En países lingüísticamente diversos, el cuestionario se traduce en más de un idioma. Se realiza un test de equivalencia que permite distinguir los procesos de respuesta de los cognitivos. Finalmente, se estudia la equivalencia de conceptos políticos en dos idiomas para un individuo (bilingüismo), proponiendo un enfoque metodológico de modelos de variables latentes. ...

Many land use decisions are made without the aid of soil maps in countries without National soil surveys. The purpose of this research was to create a soil survey delineating salinity phases at a regional scale that could serve as the basis for improved decision making, or highlight areas for further investigation. Soil salinity survey at a regional scale remains a challenge. We demonstrate a survey methodology suited to small fields, often found in Europe and developing countries, and present a streamlined survey methodology making this typically labor-intensive process more efficient. A regional soil survey was conducted at a scale of 1:25 000, mapping consociations and complexes of soil series. The soil survey information was then used to guide an electromagnetic induction (EMI) survey of the soils with observed salinity, to delineate phases. A calibration method for estimating the electrical conductivity of the extract of the saturated paste (ECe) from the EMI measurements was devised. After testing several statistical methods, a single calibration of the EMI data was found to be suitable using a nonparametric regression. The use of the EMI method reduced operation costs, where time, personnel, analysis time, and budget are limitations. ; The article is a result of the research project RTA2005–00230, funded by INIA (Spanish Government). ; Peer reviewed

BACKGROUND: Myopia is the most common visual impairment in children and adolescents worldwide. This study described an economical and effective population-based screening pipeline and performed the project of a million scale children and adolescents myopia survey (CAMS), which will shed light on the further study of myopia from the level of epidemiology and precision medicine. METHODS: We developed a novel population-based screening pattern, an intelligent screening process and internet-based information transmission and analysis system to carry out the survey consisting of school children in Wenzhou, China. The examination items include unaided distance visual acuity, presenting distance visual acuity, and non-cycloplegic autorefraction. Myopia and high myopia were defined as spherical equivalent (SE) ≤ − 1.00 diopters (D) and SE ≤ − 6.00 D, respectively. Next, the reports of the vision checking were automatically sent to parents and the related departments. The CAMS project will be done two to four times annually with the support of the government. An online eyesight status information management system (OESIMS) was developed to construct comprehensive and efficient electronic vision health records (EVHRs) for myopia information inquiry, risk pre-warning, and further study. RESULTS: The CAMS completed the first-round of screening within 30 days for 99.41% of Wenzhou students from districts and counties, in June 2019. A total of 1,060,925 participants were eligible for CAMS and 1,054,251 (99.37% participation rate) were selected through data quality control, which comprised 1305 schools, and 580,609, 251,050 and 170,967 elementary, middle, and high school students. The mean age of participants was 12.21 ± 3.32 years (6–20 years), the female-to-male ratio was 0.82. The prevalence of myopia in elementary, middle, and high school students was 38.16%, 77.52%, and 84.00%, respectively, and the high myopia incidence was 0.95%, 6.90%, and 12.98%. CONCLUSIONS: The CAMS standardized myopia screening model involves ...