The latest wave of data from the Understanding Society Innovation Panel (IP) has now been released to researchers. The Innovation Panel is a sample of 1,500 households used by researchers as a test-bed for innovative ways of collecting data and for developing new areas of research.
It helps develop leading edge survey methods and content that will ensure the ongoing success of Understanding Society and to generate important new knowledge.
The latest release, Wave 7, contains interviews with over 2,400 adults and contains many new subject areas this year as well as continuing development into mixed mode research.
Dr Annette Jäckle, Associate Director of Innovations for Understanding Society said,
“The methodological tests include experiments with different survey procedures, for example continuing experiments to test the effects of varying the amount of incentives offered to respondents in advance of fieldwork, making the incentive conditional or unconditional, or sending multiple inter-wave mailings to respondents between the annual interviews.
“Further experiments were designed to examine best practices in designing questionnaires, including how to measure attitudes towards an environmental tax, the effect of question wording on response outcomes, and the impact of how scales are presented.”
Breakdown of the experiments in wave 7
- How do people think about environmental taxes? (Malcolm Fairbrother)
- The impact of response scale direction on survey responses (Ting Yan and Florian Keusch)
- Separating systematic measurement error components using MTMM in longitudinal studies (Alexandru Cernat and Daniel Oberski)
- Experiments for survey question evaluation in multiple-country contexts (Henning Silber, Jon Krosnick, Tobias Stark, Annelies Blom, and Peter Lynn)
- Use of multiple contacts between waves (Jonathan Burton)
- The use of conditional and unconditional incentives (Jonathan Burton)
- The reliability of measures of change in self-assessed disability (Steve Pudney and Annette Jäckle)
- Wording effects of dependent interviewing questions on the amount of change observed in panel data (Annette Jäckle, Noah Uhrig and Emanuela Sala)
- Social desirability in the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) (Olena Kaminska and Cara Booker)
- Respondent incentives (Peter Lynn)
- Measuring finger digit ratios in the IP7 youth sample (Sebastian Schnettler and Cara Booker)