Workshop on Questionnaire Design Issues in Longitudinal and Repeated Cross-sectional Surveys: Balancing Continuity and Innovation at Duke University in February 2011

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

This project organizes a two-day workshop for survey methodologists and practitioners. The workshop will be held at Duke University in February 2011, and will consist of panels devoted to best practices for proposing, testing, and implementing changes to questionnaires used in longitudinal and repeated cross-sectional surveys. The workshop will feature some fifteen presenters, all of whom are being recruited on the basis of their leadership roles in major longitudinal and cross-sectional surveys and their publishing record in survey methodology topics relevant to the workshop. In total, roughly seventy researchers will participate in the workshop. Recurring surveys face a unique set of challenges--most notably, the need to balance comparability and continuity over time with any innovations in the questionnaire. The workshop is expressly designed to help clarify the appropriate standards for considering and implementing questionnaire changes in longitudinal studies, thereby informing the decision making of study investigators. The conference is also intended to encourage a broader dialogue between investigators across various major longitudinal studies, and across academic, government, non-profit, and commercial sectors. Moreover, the workshop aims to enhance future social science research: the guidance on measurement decisions it offers investigators will also inform the substantive analyses of, and conclusions reached by, the user community. The workshop makes significant and substantial broader contributions. Large-scale recurring surveys are costly projects often made possible through taxpayer support, either through government agencies (e.g., National Health Interview Survey, Current Population Survey) or through NSF grant support for "infrastructure" recurring surveys--the American National Election Studies (ANES), the General Social Survey (GSS), and the Panel Survey on Income Dynamics (PSID). These surveys serve large and diverse communities of scholars, policy-makers, and businesses, and it is essential that the data they provide be of top quality. Achieving and maintaining this standard is an ongoing challenge; this conference provides a valuable service by creating a forum in which to discuss the current state-of-the-science in updating recurring surveys and to create guidelines for broad use by those implementing such survey protocols.