We capitalise on an opportunity in the UK Household Longitudinal Study, which asks respondents the same SAH question with identical wording two times. This is done once with a self-completion and once with an open interview mode within the same household interview over four waves. We estimate...

Measures based on self-assessments, which are increasingly important in empirical economic research, are plagued by measurement error. This paper presents the first attempt at measuring both revealed and self-reported reliability of individuals' answers on self-reports of latent characteristics....

It is common practice to adapt the format of a question to the mode of data collection. Multi-coded questions in self-completion and face-to-face modes tend to be transformed for telephone into a series of 'yes/no' questions. Questions with response scales are often branched in telephone...

Household income is difficult to measure, since it requires collecting information about all potential income sources for each member of a household. We assess the effects of two types of edit check questions on measurement error and survey estimates: within-wave edit checks use responses to...

With proactive dependent interviewing respondents are reminded of the answer they gave in the previous interview, before being asked about their current status. We examine the risk that respondents falsely confirm the answers from the previous interview as still applying, using data from a panel...

To survey the general population, survey agencies often use sampling frames of landline numbers. However, these frames may exclude a relevant share of the target population. In 2012, 50% of Italian adults are excluded from the sampling frame, as they are unlisted (UN) or do not own a landline...

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

Respondents in long telephone survey interviews may adopt satisficing strategies as they approach the end of the questionnaire (Holbrook, Green and Krosnick, 2003). However, there is inconsistency regarding the relationship between questionnaire length and different forms of satisficing. We...

Mobile phone survey interviewing is becoming increasingly prevalent, so it is important to understand how it affects measurement error. We link cognitive response process theory (Tourangeau et al 2000) to theories of mode effects to build a comprehensive framework that identifies ways in which...

The paper deals with measurement error, and its potentially distorting role, in information on industry and professional status collected by labour force surveys. The focus of our analyses is on inconsistent information on these employment characteristics resulting from yearly transition...