Dear David,
As you have mentioned there are well known problems in survey research, I
am pasting an article below for those who might not know the technical
issues that we are talking about:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21399
*Abstract*
*"Household surveys, one of the main innovations in social science research
of the last century, are threatened by declining accuracy due to reduced
cooperation of respondents. While many indicators of survey quality have
steadily declined in recent decades, the literature has largely emphasized
rising nonresponse rates rather than other potentially more important
dimensions to the problem. We divide the problem into rising rates of
nonresponse, imputation, and measurement error, documenting the rise in
each of these threats to survey quality over the past three decades. A
fundamental problem in assessing biases due to these problems in surveys is
the lack of a benchmark or measure of truth, leading us to focus on the
accuracy of the reporting of government transfers. We provide evidence from
aggregate measures of transfer reporting as well as linked microdata. We
discuss the relative importance of misreporting of program receipt and
conditional amounts of benefits received, as well as some of the
conjectured reasons for declining cooperation and survey errors. We end by
discussing ways to reduce the impact of the problem including the increased
use of administrative data and the possibilities for combining
administrative and survey data."*
But that said, I want to reiterate my point, these problems are there in
any research that claim to "measure" people's opinions. (by the way I like
the word ecumenical, perhaps I can found the church of puritanical
methodologists. Maybe I can attract a few followers who knows? :) The
problem is not the instrument but the problem of getting into people's
heads (unless you are a psychic of some sort). Is ethnography reliable? In
so far as your interpretation skills, and the willingness of your
informants in being truthful.
I am writing again (I promise I will not pontificate more and I will not
write under this topic again), to understand your position better. Are you
suggesting that we should abandon survey research completely? I am asking
because there are some areas in which simply we do not have any other
viable alternatives (at least at the moment)
Two examples
1) the US government uses a survey called the current population survey
(CPS) for details see https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm to measure
unemployment in the US. Without this survey, FED does not have any other
reliable figure about unemployment in the US (and they triangulate it other
admin data).
2) Crime rates: Official crime statistics (which themselves are a form of
survey research) are notoriously not reliable. The reason is the fact that
many kinds of crimes is underreported (people do not always go to the
police or to the courts). So criminologists use something called
"victimization surveys" to be able to understand the prevalence of crime in
a geographic area and triangulate this information with official crime
statistics.
Warm wishes,
ali
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