I was honored to be the keynote speaker at the #ESRA25 @esrasurvey.bsky.social conference last week in Utrecht. A fantastic conference all around, with great talks on data collection methods, AI, data donation, questionnaire design, and much more.

Survey programs appear to be back up at Census website. Working papers on survey methods are missing. The page says that there are 486 papers, but almost all are missing from display.

Organizing files for the New Year and came across this beauty…. My PhD qualifying exam in survey methodology, covering the master’s curriculum. 33 pages long! Completed in person in 8 hours with no notes.

One of the best moments last week was catching up with my former student Rebecca Powell - and her reaction (this grin!) as she watched me buy her new book on complex survey data analysis using R, Exploring Complex Survey Data Analysis Using R: A Tidy Introduction with {srvyr} and {survey}.

Congratulations to @maryelosch.bsky.social on being named this year’s #MAPOR Fellow!

Joshua Lerner from @norc.org is up next, using ChatGPT to classify open-ended survey responses. Use a private instance to keep data local. Coded text data from two sources with 2 versions of GPT, setting temperature at 0, and had to allow sensitive topics get reported.

After lunch, more AI at #MAPOR. Trent Buskirk talking about prompting ChatGPT for writing survey questions at a given reading level. Prompts look like a sandwich - preparation, specification, and characterization.

Bethany Vanspronsen from RTI is discussing switching from a single big training for an education survey to multiple trainings over the year at #MAPOR. Data collectors liked the training approach, but keeping track of schedules and materials was hard, especially if data collection gets delayed.

Also at #MAPOR, Sunghee Lee from University of Michigan presented on using AI to translate survey instruments into Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean. AI varied in how well items for cognition taken from the HRS were translated, depending on the language, prompt, and AI tool.

I am at the #MAPOR conference. We started the morning with a fantastic short course by Jen Dykema from University of Wisconsin Sociology and UWSurvey Center on questionnaire design. Jen’s point for us methodologists is that experimental research on q’naire design on behaviors is desperately needed.

It’s not every day that you get a hard copy letter from your House Rep congratulating you on your research contributions….

Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #1,509,596!

Not quite first 10%, but in the first quartile...

New paper alert! Amanda Ganshert and I look at the effects of including a web link on the cover of a mailed questionnaire or a QR code in a survey cover letter or on the questionnaire. Now in Social Science Computer Review!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Our paper on display of battery items in a grid vs. item-by-item qns and w/wide vs. radio buttons is out in the International Journal of Market Research. Those who need a list of papers that have compared grids vs. item-by-item displays may find Table 1 helpful. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

So… this just happened…. So honored to be selected as the 2023 MAPOR Fellow!

The 2nd Field Methods paper is on qnaire design. Does it matter if you end a self-admin survey question with ... instead of writing a complete question? Mostly not (largely questions w/nominal ROs), but sometimes yes (ordinal attitudes). W/Nestor Hernandez.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

The latest issue of Field Methods has 2(!) papers that Jolene Smyth & I have with former students. First, we compare 6 different methods of calculating readability of survey qns with other qn evaluation measures - all tell something different. W/Rachel Stenger.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Department colloquiums are the best! UNL Sociology colleague Phil Schwadel talked today about work w/ former grad student Joe Jochman are doing on religious bullying over time from two studies of youth, about 2 decades apart. Many similar patterns in who reports being bullied but declines over time.

I am seeking examples of survey questions in publicly available self-administered survey qnaires that ask items formatted in a grid with response options that could be yes/no or could be an ordinal scale, and then include an “other, specify” as the last item in the list. See below for example!