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Improving Data Quality with Sociodemographic Matching?: About the Effects and Implications of Age and Gender Matching in Face-to-Face Interviews:

Improving Data Quality with Sociodemographic Matching?: About the Effects and Implications of Age... According to the theory of liking, data quality might be improved in face-to-face survey settings when there is a high degree of similarity between respondents and interviewers, for example, with regard to gender or age. Using two rounds of European Social Survey data from 25 countries including more than 70,000 respondents, this concept is tested for the dependent variables amount of item nonresponse, reluctance to answer, and the probability that a third adult person is interfering with the interview. The match between respondents and interviewers is operationalized using the variables age and gender and their statistical interactions to analyze how this relates to the outcomes. While previous studies can be corroborated, overall effect sizes are small. In general, item nonresponse is lower when a male interviewer is conducting the interview. For reluctance, there are no matching effects at all. Regarding the presence of other adults, only female respondents profit from a gender match, while age is without any effect. The results indicate that future surveys should weigh the costs and benefits of sociodemographic matching as advantages are probably small. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Applied Sociology SAGE

Improving Data Quality with Sociodemographic Matching?: About the Effects and Implications of Age and Gender Matching in Face-to-Face Interviews:

Bittmann, Felix
Journal of Applied Sociology , Volume 16 (1): 19 – Mar 19, 2021
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Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 by Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology
ISSN
0749-0232
eISSN
1937-0245
DOI
10.1177/1936724421998257
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

According to the theory of liking, data quality might be improved in face-to-face survey settings when there is a high degree of similarity between respondents and interviewers, for example, with regard to gender or age. Using two rounds of European Social Survey data from 25 countries including more than 70,000 respondents, this concept is tested for the dependent variables amount of item nonresponse, reluctance to answer, and the probability that a third adult person is interfering with the interview. The match between respondents and interviewers is operationalized using the variables age and gender and their statistical interactions to analyze how this relates to the outcomes. While previous studies can be corroborated, overall effect sizes are small. In general, item nonresponse is lower when a male interviewer is conducting the interview. For reluctance, there are no matching effects at all. Regarding the presence of other adults, only female respondents profit from a gender match, while age is without any effect. The results indicate that future surveys should weigh the costs and benefits of sociodemographic matching as advantages are probably small.

Journal

Journal of Applied Sociology – SAGE

Published: Mar 19, 2021

Keywords: survey quality; gender matching; theory of liking; European Social Survey; statistical matching

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