Tuesday 16th July
Wednesday 17th July
Thursday 18th July
Friday 19th July
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Methodological Aspects of PIAAC, the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies |
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| Convenor | Professor Beatrice Rammstedt (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) |
| Coordinator 1 | Dr Leyla Mohadjer (Westat) |
The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is a newly launched international comparative study governed by the OECD. PIAAC focuses on investigating major competencies in adults aged 16 to 65. These competencies include Literacy, Numeracy, and Problem Solving in Technology Rich Environments. To allow an in-depth analysis of persons with very low literacy scores, an additional module on Reading Components is assessed in this group.
PIAAC is an innovative study in several ways: First, for the first time the competence domain Problem Solving in Technology Rich Environments is assessed in PIAAC. Second, in the Background Questionnaire a module assessing the individual usage of competencies at work and in daily life allows comparisons between the actual skill level and its usage. Finally, from a methodological point of view, PIAAC is the first large scale educational study assessed completely computer-based.
PIAAC is currently conducted parallel in 25 countries from all over the world. Data collection based on large, random and population representative samples took place in 2011 and 2012. First results, e.g. investigating how countries perform in the different competence domains will be published in October 2013. Parallel to that date also the public use file containing data of the 25 countries will be released.
The present session will present the design of the study and the scientific value of the resulting data base. In particular we will present next to the overall design of the study methodological challenges PIAAC is facing. In addition, we will describe the overall implementation of the study standards and guidelines and will focus on challenges in specific countries given the country's constraints with regard to field work, sampling etc. Finally, we will present outlines of analyses the PIAAC data set allows.
We welcome submissions of presentations on these topics.
An extensive amount of research has been conducted and results have shown that there is a strong relationship between adult competency levels and economic success and social advancement of both individuals and countries. Thus it comes as no surprise that European governments are increasingly interested in understanding the level and distribution of competency levels in their populations and how they compare with other countries in Europe or around the world.
The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is a multi-cycle international programme of assessment of adult skills and competencies sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The data collection for the first cycle of PIAAC was conducted in 2011-2012. In 2013, another group of countries are scheduled to begin participation in a second wave of cycle 1.
Similar to other international comparative studies, the goal of PIAAC is to make inferences and comparisons across national populations on the basis of survey samples. To achieve this goal, participating countries need to follow consistent guidelines covering all aspects of the study to facilitate valid comparisons of survey results internationally.
This paper presents the results of the first round of first cycle of PIAAC focussing on sample design and selection, coverage, response rate and nonresponse bias issues, creation of sampling weights, and estimation of sampling variances.
The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is an international OECD study that compares key competencies of adults (16-65 years) in the different participating countries. In order to ensure equivalence of measurement across countries, the international PIAAC Consortium produced a very detailed and comprehensive set of compulsory standards and recommended guidelines for the national implementations of PIAAC. Regarding the international specifications pertaining to fieldwork practice and data collection, some of these deviated to a certain degree from usual national fieldwork practice for high-quality social surveys in Germany. Examples range from the extent of interviewer training required or definitions of dispositions to procedures for quality control. Striving to achieve the international standards for PIAAC brought a number of positive impulses to fieldwork in Germany. At the same time, some of the international requirements were not meaningful within the national context and required some adaptation. Some German PIAAC fieldwork measures are presented and insights at a national and international level are discussed.
PIAAC, the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, is an international study that aims at assessing the levels, distribution and use of skills as well as competencies of adults aged 16-65. As the comparability of the key estimates across participating countries is critical for the validity of the study, high-quality standards with regard to design and implementation of PIAAC had to be met. In this context countries were required to minimize potential survey errors at all stages of the project. One source of survey error is nonresponse bias, which may occur when response behavior is closely related to the survey outcome. As a consequence countries were required to reduce the potential for nonresponse bias before, during and after data collection. In this presentation we will focus on results from PIAAC Germany and illustrate the potential for nonresponse bias remaining in the data after data collection.
The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is an international OECD-study aiming to compare competencies of adults in 24 countries. The data collection was conducted via face-to-face interviews by interviewers in all participating countries; thus, interviewers were the first in line in the data collection process. As it important to ensure that all interviewers work correctly and that the data they collect is of high quality, it is interesting to understand more about interactions between interviewer characteristics and their work. We present analyses on interviewer characteristics and interviewer effects in context of the German data collection from PIAAC.
To gain insights into interviewer effects, information about the 129 German PIAAC interviewers was collected using an adapted version of the interviewer questionnaire implemented in Share 2011 (Blom and Korbmacher, 2011). The questionnaire includes information on interviewers' general attitudes and their expectations about PIAAC. Analysis of the collected data allows to learn more about characteristics of the German PIAAC interviewers: their motivation to work as an interviewer, their experience and their self-reported strategies to contact respondents. We compared each interviewer's expectation of the response rate they would achieve with the actual response rates they realized in the field. This allows to partly investigate the effect expectations might have on actual results. Furthermore, the analysis of the relationship between interviewers' characteristics with individual response rates realized, helps to understand differences between interviewers' work outcomes.