Special Issue of JRSSA
The Use of Paradata (Process Data) in Social Survey Research
The deadline of the call for papers is 28 February 2011.
The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society) seeks submissions for a special issue on ‘The Use of Paradata (Process Data) in Social Survey Research’. The deadline for submission of manuscripts will be 28 February 2011.
For this special issue we welcome manuscripts on various aspects of paradata, including (but not restricted to):
- Applications and challenges in the collection and analysis of paradata
- Analysis of interviewer effects with models informed by paradata; interviewers as agents of data collection
- Methodological research on the use of paradata; development and specification of response propensity models based on paradata
- Evaluations of the quality of paradata
- Use of paradata for survey design, including responsive and adaptive survey designs, survey management, evaluation and monitoring; paradata as tools to evaluate the quality, cost and allocations in ongoing survey operations
- Use of paradata for nonresponse adjustment
- Use of paradata to inform and adjust for measurement error in survey items
- Confidentiality issues concerning the collection of paradata
- Reviews on the type and use of paradata
Submitted manuscripts will be subject to peer review following the normal procedures of JRSS, Series A. For information about the journal and submission guidelines for authors please see the publisher's website.
It should be clearly stated in the cover letter that the manuscript is for consideration of the special issue on paradata.
The online manuscript submission, tracking and peer-review service is the simplest and fastest way to submit your paper. Submit your paper today.
(Note: Submission of manuscripts are not restricted to authors of presentations from the one-day research symposium on paradata, held on the 9th December 2010 at the Royal Statistical Society. Authors of presentations from this event, including poster presentations, however, are encouraged to submit their manuscripts to this special issue.)
For queries about the special issue, please contact the guest editors, Gabriele Durrant (g.durrant@southampton.ac.uk) and Frauke Kreuter (fkreuter@umd.edu)
Background and further information:
During the last twenty years survey data are increasingly collected through computer assisted modes. As a result, a new class of data – so called paradata (Couper, 1998) – is now available to survey methodologists. Typical examples are key-stroke files, capturing the navigation through the questionnaire, and time stamps, providing information such as date and time of each call attempt or the length of a question-answer sequence. Other examples are interviewer observations about a sampled household or neighbourhood, recordings of vocal properties of the interviewer and respondent, information about interviewers and interviewing strategies. While the type of available paradata varies by mode, all share one feature; they are a by-product of the data collection process capturing information about that process.
The potential uses of paradata are wide ranging. Survey methodologists have started to exploit paradata to guide intervention decisions during data collection and to provide opportunities for cost savings. Monitoring response times in Web surveys may, for example, lead to improvements on questionnaires. Responsive survey designs (Groves and Heeringa, 2006) promote the concurrent use of paradata to increase response rates and to decrease nonresponse bias. Fewer examples are available for the post-survey use of paradata. The hope is to use paradata to model measurement error, detect misreports and to improve nonresponse adjustments as well as in statistical models for data analysis.
Over recent years, awareness of the potential benefits of paradata has risen amongst both data producers and data users and this has been reflected in special interest and invited paper sessions at international conferences. We hope that this emerging area of research will benefit from a prominent collection of publications showing successful applications, exploring and developing methods to analyse such data, and discussing the data quality and measurement error properties of these new data sources. A better understanding of the use of paradata will benefit survey methodologists, survey practitioners, survey data providers, data analysts and users of survey data. Further research in this area would be relevant to a wide range of disciplines, such as sociology, social policy, education but also statistics and survey methodology. With this special issue we hope to raise further awareness of opportunities and benefits of using paradata for survey design, survey management, survey evaluation and methodological research and to stimulate the debate about challenges of the use of paradata.
Couper, M.P. (1998). Measuring Survey Quality in a CASIC Environment, Proceedings of the Survey Research Methods Section, American Statistical Association, 48, 743-772.
Groves, R.M. and Heeringa, S.G. (2006). Responsive Design for Household Surveys: Tools for Actively Controlling Survey Errors and Costs, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 169, 3, 439-459.