Assessing the Quality of Survey Data

Conceptualizing Data Quality: Respondent Attributes, Study Architecture, and Institutional Practices Conceptualizing Response Quality Study Architecture Institutional Quality Control Practices Data Screening Methodology Chapter OutlineEmpirical Findings on Quality and Comparability of Survey Data Response Quality Approaches to Detecting Systematic Response Errors Questionnaire Architecture Cognitive Maps in Cross-Cultural Perspective ConclusionStatistical Techniques for Data Screening Principal Component Analysis Categorical Principal Component Analysis Multiple Correspondence Analysis ConclusionInstitutional Quality Control Practices Detecting Procedural Deficiencies Data Duplication Detecting Faked and Partly Faked Interviews Data Entry Errors ConclusionSubstantive or Methodology-Induced Factors? A Comparison of PCA, CatPCA and MCA Solutions Descriptive Analysis of Personal Feelings Domain Rotation and Structure of Data ConclusionItem Difficulty and Response Quality Descriptive Analysis of Political Efficacy Domain Detecting Patterns with Subset Multiple Correspondence Analysis Moderator Effects Conclusion Questionnaire Architecture Fatigue Effect Question Order Effects Measuring Data Quality: The Dirty Data Index ConclusionCognitive Competencies and Response Quality Data and Measures Response Quality, Task Simplification and Complexity of Cognitive Maps ConclusionConclusion

This is an innovative book. Blasius and Thiessen show how careful data-analysis can uncover defects in survey data, without having recourse to meta-data or other extra information. This is good news for researchers who work with existing data sets and wish to assess their quality Joop HoxProfessor of social science methodology, Utrecht University



'This illuminating and innovative book on the quality of survey data focuses on screening procedures that should be conducted prior to assessing substantive relations. Numerous tables and visual displays based on appropriate analyses show convincing examples of procedural deficiencies, data duplicates, and faked interview, and unusual patterns in well known international datasets. Blasius and Thiessen discuss openly what is mostly covered in survey reporting, and they show ways to improve the reliability of conclusions based on survey data. A must for survey practitioners and users

Jaak BillietEmeritus professor in social methodology, University of Leuven



'I hope that many social science researchers will read Jörg Blasius and Victor Thiessen's book and realize the importance of the lesson it provides, which is that many of our data sets contain serious errors which may lead to wrong conclusions if not wrong theories. Applying the suggested tests can prevent this.Willem SarisDirector of RECSM, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona



This is an important, groundbreaking analysis of survey data quality that serves as an indispensable vade mecum for anyone engaged in gathering, analysing or utilising survey data. Clearly quality is not always what is appears to be... Assessing the Quality of Survey Data... addresses this issue in far more detail than any other work known to this reviewer. Maryam Nazari and G. E. GormanOnline Information Review

Assessing the Quality of Survey Data has been written for all researchers who want to be good data detectives...