Papers by Frederick Conrad
Technology, mind, and behavior, May 3, 2023
Field Methods, Jan 4, 2013
Time diaries are a well established method for providing population estimates of the amount of ti... more Time diaries are a well established method for providing population estimates of the amount of time and types of activities respondents carry out over the course of a full day. This paper focuses on a computer assisted telephone application developed to collect multiple, same-day 24-hour diaries from older couples who participated in the 2009 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). We present selected findings from developmental and field activities, highlighting methods for three diary enhancements: 1) implementation of a multiple, same-day diary design; 2) minimizing erroneous reporting of sequential activities as simultaneous; and 3) tailoring activity descriptors (or "follow-up" questions) that depend on a pre-coded activity value. A final section discusses limitations and implications for future time diary efforts.
Quality & Quantity, Mar 29, 2023
Measuring sexual behaviours and attitudes in hard-to-reach groups: A comparison of a non-probabil... more Measuring sexual behaviours and attitudes in hard-to-reach groups: A comparison of a non-probability web survey with a national probability sample survey.
Journal of survey statistics and methodology, Dec 3, 2020
Audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (ACASI) has been widely used to collect sensitive infor... more Audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (ACASI) has been widely used to collect sensitive information from respondents in face-to-face interviews. Interviewers ask questions that are not sensitive or only moderately sensitive and then allow respondents to self-administer more sensitive questions, listening to audio recordings of the questions and typically entering their responses directly into the same device that the interviewer has used. According to the conventional thinking, ACASI is taken as independent of the face-to-face interaction that almost always precedes it. Presumably as a result of this presumed independence, the respondents’ prior interaction with the interviewer is rarely considered when assessing the quality of ACASI responses. There is no body of existing research that has experimentally investigated how the preceding interviewer–respondent interaction may create sufficient social presence to affect responses in the subsequent ACASI module. The study reported here, a laboratory experiment with eight professional interviewers and 125 respondents, explores the carryover effects of preceding interactions between interviewer and respondent on responses in the subsequent ACASI. We evaluated the impact of the similarity of the live and recorded interviewer’s voice for each respondent as well as respondents’ rapport with interviewers in the preceding interview. We did not find significant main effects of vocal similarity on disclosure in ACASI. However, we found significant interaction effects between vocal similarity and respondents’ rapport ratings in the preceding interview on disclosure in ACASI. When the ACASI voice was similar to the interviewer’s voice in the preceding interaction, respondent-rated rapport led to more disclosure but, when the ACASI voice is clearly different from the interviewer’s voice, respondent-rated rapport in the prior interaction did not affect disclosure.
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. eBooks, Oct 29, 2007
Political Research Quarterly, Sep 17, 2008
Memory, Jul 1, 1998
When people answer survey questions of the form "During the past month, how many times d... more When people answer survey questions of the form "During the past month, how many times did you...?" their responses provide valuable data for researchers and policy makers. Yet the way respondents produce their answers to these "behavioural frequency questions" is not well understood. This article demonstrates that survey respondents can use an array of distinct estimation strategies, depending on what information is available in their memories. The kind of event information that people use is related to factors such as the regularity of occurrence, similarity of one episode to the next, and frequency. In a study conducted as a telephone survey, respondents' verbal reports and response-time patterns indicate that they usually answer behavioural frequency questions by either retrieving and counting episodes, retrieving or estimating rates of occurrence, or converting a general impression of frequency into a numerical quantity. The third strategy should be of particular concern to survey researchers because respondents provide a quantitative estimate without any relevant numerical knowledge. The set of strategies and the factors that influence their use are integrated into a statistical model that could help survey practitioners to improve data quality and memory researchers to broaden their perspective.
Journal of survey statistics and methodology, Feb 6, 2020
Interviewer-respondent rapport is generally considered to be beneficial for the quality of the da... more Interviewer-respondent rapport is generally considered to be beneficial for the quality of the data collected in survey interviews; however, the relationship between rapport and data quality has rarely been directly investigated. We conducted a laboratory experiment in which eight professional interviewers interviewed 125 respondents to see how the rapport between interviewers and respondents is associated with the quality of data-primarily disclosure of sensitive information-collected in these interviews. It is possible that increased rapport between interviewers and respondents might motivate respondents to be more conscientious, increasing disclosure; alternatively, increased rapport might inhibit disclosure because presenting oneself unfavorably is more aversive if respondents have a positive relationship with the interviewer. More specifically, we examined three issues: (1) what the relationship is between rapport and the disclosure of information of varying levels of sensitivity, (2) how rapport is associated with item nonresponse, and (3) whether rapport can be similarly established in video-mediated and computerassisted personal interviews (CAPIs). We found that (1) increased respondents' sense of rapport increased disclosure for questions that are
Journal of survey statistics and methodology, Sep 27, 2021
With the ubiquity of smartphones, it is possible to collect self-reports as well as to passively ... more With the ubiquity of smartphones, it is possible to collect self-reports as well as to passively measure behaviors and states (e.g., locations, movement, activity, and sleep) with native sensors and the smartphone’s operating system, both on a single device that usually accompanies participants throughout the day. This research synthesis brings structure to a rapidly expanding body of literature on the combined collection of self-reports and passive measurement using smartphones, pointing out how and why researchers have combined these two types of data and where more work is needed. We distinguish between five reasons why researchers might want to integrate the two data sources and how this has been helpful: (1) verification, for example, confirming start and end of passively detected trips, (2) contextualization, for example, asking about the purpose of a passively detected trip, (3) quantifying relationships, for example, quantifying the association between self-reported stress and passively measured sleep duration, (4) building composite measures, for example, measuring components of stress that participants are aware of through self-reports and those they are not through passively measured speech attributes, and (5) triggering measurement, for example, asking survey questions contingent on certain passively measured events or participant locations. We discuss challenges of collecting self-reports and passively tracking participants’ behavior with smartphones from the perspective of representation (e.g., who owns a smartphone and who is willing to share their data), measurement (e.g., different levels of temporal granularity in self-reports and passively collected data), and privacy considerations (e.g., the greater intrusiveness of passive measurement than self-reports). While we see real potential in this approach it is not yet clear if its impact will be incremental or will revolutionize the field.
Oxford University Press eBooks, May 1, 2013
Psychology Press eBooks, Jun 17, 2013
... and Douglas Raybeck 3 Basic and Applied Memory Research: Empirical, Theoretical, and Metatheo... more ... and Douglas Raybeck 3 Basic and Applied Memory Research: Empirical, Theoretical, and Metatheoretical Issues 45 David G. Payne, Frederick G. Conrad ... We would also like to thank our spouses (Robyn M. Reichert and Elizabeth A. Brooksl and families for their continued love ...
There has been much interest in using social media to track public opinion. We introduce a higher... more There has been much interest in using social media to track public opinion. We introduce a higher level of scrutiny to these types of analyses, specifically looking at the relationship between presidential approval and “Trump” tweets and developing a framework to interpret its strength. We use placebo analyses, performing the same analysis but with tweets assumed to be unrelated to presidential approval, to assess the relationship and conclude that the relationship is less strong than it might otherwise seem. Secondly, we suggest following users longitudinally, which enables us to find evidence of a political signal around the 2016 presidential election. For the goal of supplementing traditional surveys with social media data, our results are encouraging, but cautionary.
BMC Medical Research Methodology, Oct 8, 2020
Background: In health research, population estimates are generally obtained from probability-base... more Background: In health research, population estimates are generally obtained from probability-based surveys. In market research surveys are frequently conducted from volunteer web panels. Propensity score adjustment (PSA) is often used at analysis to try to remove bias in the web survey, but empirical evidence of its effectiveness is mixed. We assess the ability of PSA to remove bias in the context of sensitive sexual health research and the potential of web panel surveys to replace or supplement probability surveys. Methods: Four web panel surveys asked a subset of questions from the third British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3). Five propensity scores were generated for each web survey. The scores were developed from progressively larger sets of variables, beginning with demographic variables only and ending with demographic, sexual identity, lifestyle, attitudinal and sexual behaviour variables together. The surveys were weighted to match Natsal-3 based on propensity score quintiles. The performance of each survey and weighting was assessed by calculating the average 'absolute' odds ratio (inverse of the odds ratio if less than 1) across 22 prespecified sexual behaviour outcomes of interest comparing the weighted web survey with Natsal-3. The average standard error across odds ratios was examined to assess the impact of weighting upon variance. Results: Propensity weighting reduced bias relative to Natsal-3 as more variables were added for males, but had little effect for females, and variance increased for some surveys. Surveys with more biased estimates before propensity weighting showed greater reduction in bias from adjustment. Inconsistencies in performance were evident across surveys and outcomes. For most surveys and outcomes any reduction in bias was only partial and for some outcomes the bias increased. Conclusions: Even after propensity weighting using a rich range of information, including some sexual behaviour variables, some bias remained and variance increased for some web surveys. Whilst our findings support the use of PSA for web panel surveys, the reduction in bias is likely to be partial and unpredictable, consistent with the findings from market research. Our results do not support the use of volunteer web panels to generate unbiased population health estimates.
Social Science Computer Review, Feb 1, 2004
Several alternative response formats are available to the web survey designer, but the choice of ... more Several alternative response formats are available to the web survey designer, but the choice of format is often made with little consideration of measurement error. The authors experimentally explore three common response formats used in web surveys: a series of radio buttons, a drop box with none of the options initially displayed until the respondent clicks on the box, and a scrollable drop box with some of the options initially visible, requiring the respondent to scroll to see the remainder of the options. The authors reversed the order of the response options for half the sample. The authors find evidence of response order effects but stronger evidence that visible response options are endorsed more frequently, suggesting that visibility may be a more powerful effect than primacy in web surveys. The results suggest that the response format used in web surveys does affect the choices made by respondents.
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Papers by Frederick Conrad