Rap Robyn, Paxton Pamela
Indeed, Austin, TX, USA.
Department of Sociology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
Sociol Methods Res. 2021 May;50(2):866-900. doi: 10.1177/0049124118799384. Epub 2018 Oct 3.
Questions on voluntary association memberships have been used extensively in social scientific research for decades. Researchers generally assume that these respondent self-reports are accurate, but their measurement has never been assessed. Respondent characteristics are known to influence the accuracy of other self-report variables such as self-reported health, voting, or test scores. In this article, we investigate whether measurement error occurs in self-reports of voluntary association memberships. We use the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS) questions on voluntary associations, which include a novel resource: the actual organization names listed by respondents. We find that this widely used voluntary association classification scheme contains significant amounts of measurement error overall, especially within certain categories. Using a multilevel logistic regression, we predict accuracy of response nested within respondents and interviewers. We find that certain respondent characteristics, including some used in research on voluntary associations, influence respondent accuracy. Inaccurate and/or incorrect measurement will affect the statistics and conclusions drawn from the data on voluntary associations.
几十年来，关于自愿社团成员身份的问题在社会科学研究中被广泛使用。研究人员通常认为这些受访者的自我报告是准确的，但从未对其测量方法进行过评估。众所周知，受访者的特征会影响其他自我报告变量的准确性，如自我报告的健康状况、投票情况或考试成绩。在本文中，我们调查了自愿社团成员身份的自我报告中是否存在测量误差。我们使用了2004年综合社会调查（GSS）中关于自愿社团的问题，其中包括一个新资源：受访者列出的实际组织名称。我们发现，这种广泛使用的自愿社团分类方案总体上包含大量测量误差，尤其是在某些类别中。通过多级逻辑回归，我们预测了嵌套在受访者和访谈者中的回答准确性。我们发现，某些受访者特征，包括一些在自愿社团研究中使用的特征，会影响受访者的准确性。不准确和/或错误的测量将影响从自愿社团数据中得出的统计数据和结论。
