Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg, Germany; Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany.
Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg, Germany; Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany.
Econ Hum Biol. 2022 Apr;45:101118. doi: 10.1016/j.ehb.2022.101118. Epub 2022 Feb 28.
Surveys serve as an important source of information on key anthropometric characteristics such as body height or weight in the population. Such data are often obtained by directly asking respondents to report those values. Numerous studies have examined measurement errors in this context by comparing reported to measured values. However, little is known on the role of interviewers on the prevalence of irregularities in anthropometric survey data. In this study, we explore such interviewer effects in two ways. First, we use data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and the UK Household Longitudinal Study to evaluate whether differences between reported and measured values are clustered within interviewers. Second, we investigate changes in adult self-reported height over survey waves in two German large-scale panel surveys. Here, we exploit that height should be constant over time for the majority of adult age groups. In both analyses, we use multilevel location-scale models to identify interviewers who enhance reporting errors and interviewers for whom unlikely height changes over waves occur frequently. Our results reveal that interviewers can play a prominent role in differences between reported and measured height values and changes in reported height over survey waves. We further provide an analysis of the consequences of height misreporting on substantive regression coefficients where we especially focus on the role of interviewers who reinforce reporting errors and unlikely height changes.
调查是获取人口重要人体测量特征（如身高或体重）信息的重要来源。此类数据通常通过直接要求受访者报告这些数值来获得。许多研究通过比较报告值和测量值来检验这种情况下的测量误差。然而，对于调查员在人体测量调查数据不规则性中的作用知之甚少。在这项研究中，我们通过两种方式探索这种调查员效应。首先，我们使用来自美国国家健康和营养检查调查和英国家庭纵向研究的数据，评估报告值和测量值之间的差异是否在调查员内部存在聚类。其次，我们在两个德国大型面板调查中研究了成年人自我报告的身高在调查波之间的变化。在这里，我们假设身高在大多数成年年龄段应该是恒定的。在这两种分析中，我们都使用多层次位置-规模模型来识别那些增加报告误差的调查员和那些经常出现波次之间身高不寻常变化的调查员。我们的结果表明，调查员可以在报告值和测量值之间的差异以及报告值在调查波之间的变化中发挥重要作用。我们进一步分析了身高虚报对实质回归系数的影响，特别关注那些强化报告误差和不寻常身高变化的调查员的作用。
