Producing Data for Comparative Social Surveys: Survey Management, Collaboration and Communication and the Impact on Data Quality |
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| Coordinator 1 | Professor Jürgen H. P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik (Institute of Political Science, Justus Liebig University, Giessen) |
| Coordinator 2 | Dr Uwe Warner (Methodenzentrum Sozialwissenschaften, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen) |
Doing comparative social survey research involves many kind of people. They fulfill different tasks and act in various roles in the process of producing comparative survey data. And they have to collaborate. The implementation and organization of this collaboration affect the collected data, the design of the fieldwork instruments, the question wordings, the measurement quality, the selection of the measurement concepts, and the choice of social theories driving the decisions during this data production process.
The large scale data collections for comparative surveys (e.g. ESS, SHARE, ISSP, WVS/EVS, Eurobarometer, EU-SILC, EU-LFS, and others) have different strategies to realize their tasks. They have different division of labor on various levels to establish the communication and cooperation between the actors involved.
Common to all forms of organizing the data collection for comparative social survey data is the workflow
- starting with the decision-making about the theory-driven research questions,
- the selection of comparable and harmonized measurement concepts applied in the study,
- the evaluation of measurable variables measuring the social facts that are intended to be measures cross-nationally, cross-culturally and over time,
- the wording of the survey question understandable and meaningful to the future respondent,
- recording the interviewee’s answer,
- preparing and providing the data and the documentation, and finally
- making the survey and fieldwork reports available to the scientific community, so that comparative use of the data becomes meaningful and relevant for the research.
Involved in this workflow are central project coordinators, national research teams, national fieldwork agencies with their interviewers and last but not least the respondents answering the survey questions.
Among others, we are interested in following topics:
- How the degrees of collaboration and communication among survey producers for comparative studies affects the data production process and the data dissemination?
- How the relationships between the actors involved hampers or fosters innovation in comparative social survey research?
- How the teamwork among the involved actors ensures or prevents from comparison of social survey data?
- How the described workflow has implications to the measurement quality of comparative survey data?
- How the harmonization, standardization and the “making the social survey measures comparable” depend on the collaboration between the involved researchers?