This paper focuses on fraud detection in surveys using Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data as an example for testing newlymethods proposed here. A statistical theoremreferred to as Benford’s Law states that in many sets of numerical data, the significant digits are not uniformly distributed, as...

To the best of our knowledge, most of the few methodological studies which analyze the impact of faked interviews on survey results are based on “artificial fakes” generated by project students in a “laboratory environment”. In contrast, panel data provide a unique opportunity to...

To the best of our knowledge, most of the few methodological studies which analyze the impact of faked interviews on survey results are based on “artificial fakes” generated by project students in a “laboratory environment”. In contrast, panel data provide a unique opportunity to...

The results of a resurvey of non-respondents to the SOEP study carried out in 2006 show that this special effort of reinterviewing was relatively ineffective in two respects. First, the rate of successful conversions of passive to active respondents was low (less than 20 percent). Second, the...

Many validation studies deal with item nonresponse and measurement error in earnings data. In this article, the author explores respondents’ motives for failing to reveal earnings using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). The SOEP collects socioeconomic information from private...

This article examines the implications of moving to Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) for data quality by analyzing the transition from Paper-and-Pencil (PAPI) to Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) on a subsample of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) conducted using...

This paper presents two new tools for the identification of faking interviewers in surveys. One method is based on Benford's Law, and the other exploits the empirical observation that fakers most often produce answers with less variability than could be expected from the whole survey. We focus...

Many validation studies deal with item-nonresponse and measurement error in earnings data. In this paper we explore motives of respondents for the failure to reveal earnings using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). GSOEP collects socio-economic information of private households in the...

This paper examines the implication of the move to CAPI for data quality by analyzing the conversion from PAPI to CAPI of a subsample of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) which was done within an experimental design. The 2000 addresses for the sample E of SOEP were split into two subsamples...