Database Lookups for Socio-Demographics in Surveys |
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| Coordinator 1 | Dr Silke Schneider (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) |
| Coordinator 2 | Ms Stephanie Stuck (Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy, SHARE) |
In the age of digitization, rapid changes take place regarding what can be done in surveys to collect and code empirical data for administrative and research purposes. One development promising reduced office coding, less harmonization logistics and thus cost savings is to link survey questionnaires with large databases to allow the coding of survey variables during the interview.
Such procedures are most interesting for the measurement of respondents’ socio-demographics because they usually cannot be measured with scales but often require more or less detailed and elaborate categorical classification systems. Database lookups can either replace open questions that need to be post-coded, such as occupation, industry, country (e.g. of birth) or language (e.g. mother tongue or language most spoken at home), or long-list questions like education or fields of study.
What is less known is a) the effort required by survey organizations to implement such technologies in various kinds of surveys, and b) how interviewers and respondents in various survey modes experience such procedures. Are database lookups more or less burdensome than standard questions? Do they require more or less interview time? Is the quality of the resulting data comparable across the two approaches? Can the procedures possibly also be used for proxy measurements (e.g. parental occupation or education)? And finally c), what steps need to be taken to implement such procedures in surveys at a large scale?
This session invites presentations of past developments, ongoing research and promising designs to make use of databases lookups for capturing socio-demographics in surveys, and evaluate the resulting data quality. Contributions regarding the use of databases for post-survey processing of socio-demographic information will also be considered in this session. While large cross-national surveys are, because of their requirement to produce cross-nationally comparable data, most interested in such developments, evidence from small-scale or national projects are also welcome.