We examine the effects of interviewer–respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates ... more We examine the effects of interviewer–respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates of item nonresponse when self-administered questions (SAQs) are used. We use SAQ data from a survey in which the researchers experimentally ensured that there would be varying degrees of familiarity between interviewers and respondents. Our results reveal only minimal differences in response patterns by degree of prior acquain-tance between interviewer and respondent, indicating that SAQs are effec-tive at eliminating potential bias stemming from such relationships. Our results for item nonresponse depend on how we measure the relationship between interviewer and respondent; but in all cases, it is clear that prior knowledge of one another, far from harmful, leads to low nonresponse rates to SAQs. Thus, researchers using SAQs may not need to adhere to the norm that interviewers and respondents must be strangers, with prac-tical and cost-effective consequences for data collection.
Worldwide migrant remittances exceeded $60 billion in 2000, with nearly 83 % of that amount going... more Worldwide migrant remittances exceeded $60 billion in 2000, with nearly 83 % of that amount going to developing countries (International Monetary Fund 2001, Table B-19.) This figure is based on national balance of payments statistics, which cannot account for international transfers made through non-institutional channels. A recent survey of Latin American immigrants in the United States recorded that, while the vast majority of remittances are channeled through financial firms, 15 % of them reach home through people traveling (Bendixen and Associates 2002). Hence, the global remittance flow is surely underestimated by billions of dollars. Not only is the sheer magnitude of migrant remittances impressive, but it has been continuously on the rise over the years. The IMF (2001) reports that worldwide remittances increased by about a third since 1994. The largest growth was recorded in Latin America and the Caribbean, where workers’ remittances rose from 9.7 billion dollars in 1994 to ...
Abstract This dissertation consists of three essays on migrant transfers. In the first essay, bas... more Abstract This dissertation consists of three essays on migrant transfers. In the first essay, based on the theoretical rationale of new economics of labor migration, I show that family structure and degree of market development play important roles in explaining remitting ...
Data from the Latin American Migration Project (LAMP) and the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) is ... more Data from the Latin American Migration Project (LAMP) and the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) is combined to analyze migration patterns for Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Drawing on samples of 31 communities, we document the frequency and timing of migration, the date, duration, destination, and documentation of the first and the most recent U.S. trips, the employment characteristics of migrants on those trips, and migrants’ socioeconomic characteristics and selectivity. Results show that a significant share of the migration is unauthorized. The distinctive features separating Mexican migration from other flows are its concentration in farm labor, lack of educational selectivity, more frequent trips, and shorter durations of stay. All groups are showing a pronounced tendency to settle away from traditional destination areas. The analysis suggests a commonality of basic patterns and processes of migration structured and expressed in distinct w...
Bulletin of Sociological Methodology/Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique
Evaluating a long–term methodological norm – the use of interviewers who have no prior social rel... more Evaluating a long–term methodological norm – the use of interviewers who have no prior social relationship to respondents – we compare response patterns across levels of interviewer–respondent familiarity. We differentiate three distinct levels of interviewer–respondent familiarity, based on whether the interviewer is directly acquainted with the respondent or their family, acquainted with the research setting, or is a complete outsider. We also identify three mechanisms through which variability in interviewer–respondent familiarity can affect survey responses: the effort a respondent is willing to make; their level of trust in the interviewer; and interview–specific situational factors. Using data from a methodological experiment fielded in the Dominican Republic, we then gauge the effects of each of these on a range of behavioral and attitudinal questions. Empirical results suggest that respondents expend marginally more effort in answering questions posed by insider–interviewers...
Survey research in developing countries often runs into problems of incompleteness or inconsisten... more Survey research in developing countries often runs into problems of incompleteness or inconsistencies during the data collection stage. To solve these problems, field teams often rely on “expert field guess” (EFG), a widespread practice among survey fieldworkers that is generally not acknowledged. EFG involves making guesses about “correct” responses in order to fix missing or inconsistent data. We report the results of an experiment designed to evaluate EFG. The experiment altered correctly completed surveys in various ways, in order to ask four categories of participants to attempt corrections. The participants included interviewers, field supervisors, data managers, and data users. The experiment tested whether field workers made more accurate guesses than others who are further removed from the survey setting. Of particular interest is the comparison between participants’ guesses on missing data and imputations made using standard statistical methods. Results show that EFG appea...
Eight decades of opinion polls (1938–2019) on US refugee policies show that most Americans have h... more Eight decades of opinion polls (1938–2019) on US refugee policies show that most Americans have historically opposed admitting refugees but this trend has been reversed in the twenty-first century. An examination of the questions pollsters asked reveals that when respondents were offered a middle response choice (e.g. “the number of refugees is about right”), their opposition often morphed into approval of the admissions status quo. Findings also show some evidence of a fait-accompli effect: The public tended to be more supportive of refugees when welcoming policies were enacted and when refugees were already on US soil. Furthermore, the United States public reported more supportive attitudes toward refugees when asked about any type of policy — welcoming or restrictive — and when asked questions concerning the context of reception of admitted refugees. I label this pattern a “sympathy effect,” whereby respondents revealed more support for refugees when answering contextualized rath...
We examine the effects of interviewer-respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates ... more We examine the effects of interviewer-respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates of item nonresponse when self-administered questions (SAQs) are used. We use SAQ data from a survey in which the researchers experimentally ensured that there would be varying degrees of familiarity between interviewers and respondents. Our results reveal only minimal differences in response patterns by degree of prior acquaintance between interviewer and respondent, indicating that SAQs are effective at eliminating potential bias stemming from such relationships. Our results for item nonresponse depend on how we measure the relationship between interviewer and respondent; but in all cases, it is clear that prior knowledge of one another, far from harmful, leads to low nonresponse rates to SAQs. Thus, researchers using SAQs may not need to adhere to the norm that interviewers and respondents must be strangers, with practical and cost-effective consequences for data collection.
This dissertation consists of three essays on migrant transfers. In the first essay, based on the... more This dissertation consists of three essays on migrant transfers. In the first essay, based on the theoretical rationale of new economics of labor migration, I show that family structure and degree of market development play important roles in explaining remitting ...
Bulletin of Sociological Methodology/Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique, 2018
Evaluating a long–term methodological norm – the use of interviewers who have no prior social rel... more Evaluating a long–term methodological norm – the use of interviewers who have no prior social relationship to respondents – we compare response patterns across levels of interviewer–respondent familiarity. We differentiate three distinct levels of interviewer–respondent familiarity, based on whether the interviewer is directly acquainted with the respondent or their family, acquainted with the research setting, or is a complete outsider. We also identify three mechanisms through which variability in interviewer–respondent familiarity can affect survey responses: the effort a respondent is willing to make; their level of trust in the interviewer; and interview–specific situational factors. Using data from a methodological experiment fielded in the Dominican Republic, we then gauge the effects of each of these on a range of behavioral and attitudinal questions. Empirical results suggest that respondents expend marginally more effort in answering questions posed by insider–interviewers, and that they also lie less to insider–interviewers. Differences in responses to “trust” questions also largely favor insider–interviewers. Overall, therefore, local interviewers, including those whom, in blatant violation of the stranger–interviewer norm, have a prior relationship with the respondent, collect superior data on some items. And on almost no item do they collect data that are measurably worse.
We offer the first empirical test of the “stranger-interviewer norm,” which states that in social... more We offer the first empirical test of the “stranger-interviewer norm,” which states that in social, demographic, and health surveys, interviewers should be strangers—not personally familiar with respondents. We use data from an experimental survey fielded in the Dominican Republic, which featured three types of interviewers: from out of town (outsiders), local but unknown to the respondent (local-stranger), and local with a prior relationship with the respondent (insiders). We were able to validate answers to up to 18 questions per respondent, mainly by checking official documents in their possession. Contrary to expectations derived from the stranger-interviewer norm, respondents were more reluctant to show the documents needed for validation when the interviewer was an outsider. Furthermore, and again at odds with the stranger-interviewer norm, we found no difference in accuracy by type of interviewer. Our results have considerable implications for survey data collection approaches in less developed and non-Western settings.
Sterilization levels reported in the Dominican Republic appear well above what we would normally ... more Sterilization levels reported in the Dominican Republic appear well above what we would normally expect given prevailing patterns in the region. We suspect that the use of strangers as interviewers—the normative approach in data collection in both developed and developing country settings—may be partly responsible for this result, and may underlie a long history of bias in family planning data.We present findings from a field experiment conducted in a Dominican town in 2010, where interviewer assignment was randomized by level of preexisting level of familiarity between interviewer and respondent. In our data, sterilization use is higher when the interviewer is an outsider, as opposed to someone known to the respondent or from the same community. In addition, high sterilization use is correlated with a propensity of respondents to present themselves in a positive light to interviewers. These results call into question the routine use of strangers and outsiders as interviewers in demographic and health surveys.
We examine the effects of interviewer-respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates ... more We examine the effects of interviewer-respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates of item nonresponse when self-administered questions (SAQs) are used. We use SAQ data from a survey in which the researchers experimentally ensured that there would be varying degrees of familiarity between interviewers and respondents. Our results reveal only minimal differences in response patterns by degree of prior acquaintance between interviewer and respondent, indicating that SAQs are effective at eliminating potential bias stemming from such relationships. Our results for item nonresponse depend on how we measure the relationship between interviewer and respondent; but in all cases, it is clear that prior knowledge of one another, far from harmful, leads to low nonresponse rates to SAQs. Thus, researchers using SAQs may not need to adhere to the norm that interviewers and respondents must be strangers, with practical and cost-effective consequences for data collection.
We examine the effects of interviewer–respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates ... more We examine the effects of interviewer–respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates of item nonresponse when self-administered questions (SAQs) are used. We use SAQ data from a survey in which the researchers experimentally ensured that there would be varying degrees of familiarity between interviewers and respondents. Our results reveal only minimal differences in response patterns by degree of prior acquain-tance between interviewer and respondent, indicating that SAQs are effec-tive at eliminating potential bias stemming from such relationships. Our results for item nonresponse depend on how we measure the relationship between interviewer and respondent; but in all cases, it is clear that prior knowledge of one another, far from harmful, leads to low nonresponse rates to SAQs. Thus, researchers using SAQs may not need to adhere to the norm that interviewers and respondents must be strangers, with prac-tical and cost-effective consequences for data collection.
Worldwide migrant remittances exceeded $60 billion in 2000, with nearly 83 % of that amount going... more Worldwide migrant remittances exceeded $60 billion in 2000, with nearly 83 % of that amount going to developing countries (International Monetary Fund 2001, Table B-19.) This figure is based on national balance of payments statistics, which cannot account for international transfers made through non-institutional channels. A recent survey of Latin American immigrants in the United States recorded that, while the vast majority of remittances are channeled through financial firms, 15 % of them reach home through people traveling (Bendixen and Associates 2002). Hence, the global remittance flow is surely underestimated by billions of dollars. Not only is the sheer magnitude of migrant remittances impressive, but it has been continuously on the rise over the years. The IMF (2001) reports that worldwide remittances increased by about a third since 1994. The largest growth was recorded in Latin America and the Caribbean, where workers’ remittances rose from 9.7 billion dollars in 1994 to ...
Abstract This dissertation consists of three essays on migrant transfers. In the first essay, bas... more Abstract This dissertation consists of three essays on migrant transfers. In the first essay, based on the theoretical rationale of new economics of labor migration, I show that family structure and degree of market development play important roles in explaining remitting ...
Data from the Latin American Migration Project (LAMP) and the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) is ... more Data from the Latin American Migration Project (LAMP) and the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) is combined to analyze migration patterns for Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Drawing on samples of 31 communities, we document the frequency and timing of migration, the date, duration, destination, and documentation of the first and the most recent U.S. trips, the employment characteristics of migrants on those trips, and migrants’ socioeconomic characteristics and selectivity. Results show that a significant share of the migration is unauthorized. The distinctive features separating Mexican migration from other flows are its concentration in farm labor, lack of educational selectivity, more frequent trips, and shorter durations of stay. All groups are showing a pronounced tendency to settle away from traditional destination areas. The analysis suggests a commonality of basic patterns and processes of migration structured and expressed in distinct w...
Bulletin of Sociological Methodology/Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique
Evaluating a long–term methodological norm – the use of interviewers who have no prior social rel... more Evaluating a long–term methodological norm – the use of interviewers who have no prior social relationship to respondents – we compare response patterns across levels of interviewer–respondent familiarity. We differentiate three distinct levels of interviewer–respondent familiarity, based on whether the interviewer is directly acquainted with the respondent or their family, acquainted with the research setting, or is a complete outsider. We also identify three mechanisms through which variability in interviewer–respondent familiarity can affect survey responses: the effort a respondent is willing to make; their level of trust in the interviewer; and interview–specific situational factors. Using data from a methodological experiment fielded in the Dominican Republic, we then gauge the effects of each of these on a range of behavioral and attitudinal questions. Empirical results suggest that respondents expend marginally more effort in answering questions posed by insider–interviewers...
Survey research in developing countries often runs into problems of incompleteness or inconsisten... more Survey research in developing countries often runs into problems of incompleteness or inconsistencies during the data collection stage. To solve these problems, field teams often rely on “expert field guess” (EFG), a widespread practice among survey fieldworkers that is generally not acknowledged. EFG involves making guesses about “correct” responses in order to fix missing or inconsistent data. We report the results of an experiment designed to evaluate EFG. The experiment altered correctly completed surveys in various ways, in order to ask four categories of participants to attempt corrections. The participants included interviewers, field supervisors, data managers, and data users. The experiment tested whether field workers made more accurate guesses than others who are further removed from the survey setting. Of particular interest is the comparison between participants’ guesses on missing data and imputations made using standard statistical methods. Results show that EFG appea...
Eight decades of opinion polls (1938–2019) on US refugee policies show that most Americans have h... more Eight decades of opinion polls (1938–2019) on US refugee policies show that most Americans have historically opposed admitting refugees but this trend has been reversed in the twenty-first century. An examination of the questions pollsters asked reveals that when respondents were offered a middle response choice (e.g. “the number of refugees is about right”), their opposition often morphed into approval of the admissions status quo. Findings also show some evidence of a fait-accompli effect: The public tended to be more supportive of refugees when welcoming policies were enacted and when refugees were already on US soil. Furthermore, the United States public reported more supportive attitudes toward refugees when asked about any type of policy — welcoming or restrictive — and when asked questions concerning the context of reception of admitted refugees. I label this pattern a “sympathy effect,” whereby respondents revealed more support for refugees when answering contextualized rath...
We examine the effects of interviewer-respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates ... more We examine the effects of interviewer-respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates of item nonresponse when self-administered questions (SAQs) are used. We use SAQ data from a survey in which the researchers experimentally ensured that there would be varying degrees of familiarity between interviewers and respondents. Our results reveal only minimal differences in response patterns by degree of prior acquaintance between interviewer and respondent, indicating that SAQs are effective at eliminating potential bias stemming from such relationships. Our results for item nonresponse depend on how we measure the relationship between interviewer and respondent; but in all cases, it is clear that prior knowledge of one another, far from harmful, leads to low nonresponse rates to SAQs. Thus, researchers using SAQs may not need to adhere to the norm that interviewers and respondents must be strangers, with practical and cost-effective consequences for data collection.
This dissertation consists of three essays on migrant transfers. In the first essay, based on the... more This dissertation consists of three essays on migrant transfers. In the first essay, based on the theoretical rationale of new economics of labor migration, I show that family structure and degree of market development play important roles in explaining remitting ...
Bulletin of Sociological Methodology/Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique, 2018
Evaluating a long–term methodological norm – the use of interviewers who have no prior social rel... more Evaluating a long–term methodological norm – the use of interviewers who have no prior social relationship to respondents – we compare response patterns across levels of interviewer–respondent familiarity. We differentiate three distinct levels of interviewer–respondent familiarity, based on whether the interviewer is directly acquainted with the respondent or their family, acquainted with the research setting, or is a complete outsider. We also identify three mechanisms through which variability in interviewer–respondent familiarity can affect survey responses: the effort a respondent is willing to make; their level of trust in the interviewer; and interview–specific situational factors. Using data from a methodological experiment fielded in the Dominican Republic, we then gauge the effects of each of these on a range of behavioral and attitudinal questions. Empirical results suggest that respondents expend marginally more effort in answering questions posed by insider–interviewers, and that they also lie less to insider–interviewers. Differences in responses to “trust” questions also largely favor insider–interviewers. Overall, therefore, local interviewers, including those whom, in blatant violation of the stranger–interviewer norm, have a prior relationship with the respondent, collect superior data on some items. And on almost no item do they collect data that are measurably worse.
We offer the first empirical test of the “stranger-interviewer norm,” which states that in social... more We offer the first empirical test of the “stranger-interviewer norm,” which states that in social, demographic, and health surveys, interviewers should be strangers—not personally familiar with respondents. We use data from an experimental survey fielded in the Dominican Republic, which featured three types of interviewers: from out of town (outsiders), local but unknown to the respondent (local-stranger), and local with a prior relationship with the respondent (insiders). We were able to validate answers to up to 18 questions per respondent, mainly by checking official documents in their possession. Contrary to expectations derived from the stranger-interviewer norm, respondents were more reluctant to show the documents needed for validation when the interviewer was an outsider. Furthermore, and again at odds with the stranger-interviewer norm, we found no difference in accuracy by type of interviewer. Our results have considerable implications for survey data collection approaches in less developed and non-Western settings.
Sterilization levels reported in the Dominican Republic appear well above what we would normally ... more Sterilization levels reported in the Dominican Republic appear well above what we would normally expect given prevailing patterns in the region. We suspect that the use of strangers as interviewers—the normative approach in data collection in both developed and developing country settings—may be partly responsible for this result, and may underlie a long history of bias in family planning data.We present findings from a field experiment conducted in a Dominican town in 2010, where interviewer assignment was randomized by level of preexisting level of familiarity between interviewer and respondent. In our data, sterilization use is higher when the interviewer is an outsider, as opposed to someone known to the respondent or from the same community. In addition, high sterilization use is correlated with a propensity of respondents to present themselves in a positive light to interviewers. These results call into question the routine use of strangers and outsiders as interviewers in demographic and health surveys.
We examine the effects of interviewer-respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates ... more We examine the effects of interviewer-respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates of item nonresponse when self-administered questions (SAQs) are used. We use SAQ data from a survey in which the researchers experimentally ensured that there would be varying degrees of familiarity between interviewers and respondents. Our results reveal only minimal differences in response patterns by degree of prior acquaintance between interviewer and respondent, indicating that SAQs are effective at eliminating potential bias stemming from such relationships. Our results for item nonresponse depend on how we measure the relationship between interviewer and respondent; but in all cases, it is clear that prior knowledge of one another, far from harmful, leads to low nonresponse rates to SAQs. Thus, researchers using SAQs may not need to adhere to the norm that interviewers and respondents must be strangers, with practical and cost-effective consequences for data collection.
Once the violent course of the Mexican revolution subsided, and political stability cemented on a... more Once the violent course of the Mexican revolution subsided, and political stability cemented on a strong state apparatus took hold, Mexico entered a steady path of economic growth. Between about 1940 and 1970 the state intervened forcefully to propel urban industrial development. Those were the golden years of import substitution industrialization (ISI), which for working class manufacturing workers in Mexican cities meant a living wage, subsidized housing and health FDUH VRFLDO VHFXULW\ DQG YDULRXV SHUTXLVLWHV DOO VXSSRUWHG E\ D VWURQJ VWDWH WKDW mediated between industrialists and unions. Since the early 1980s, ISI gave way to export-oriented industrialization (EOI). EOI features a smaller and retreating VWDWH ODERU ³ÀH[LELOL]DWLRQ´ ZHDN XQLRQV LQVXI¿FLHQW ZDJHV DQG WKH ULVH RI WKH informal urban economy as a poor substitute for the relative economic security of the past. The ISI-EOI story is, of course, well known to anyone familiar with twentieth-century Mexico -or, for that matter, with twentieth-century Latin America. But the link between the macroeconomic model and urban Mexican PLJUDWLRQ WR WKH 8QLWHG 6WDWHV LV QRW 5XEpQ +HUQiQGH]/HyQ DGGUHVVHV WKLV FRQQHFWLRQ ,Q D ¿HOG UHSOHWH ZLWK VWXGLHV RI UXUDO 0H[LFDQ PLJUDWLRQ WR WKH U.S., his book is groundbreaking and a refreshing read. Metropolitan Migrants is the result of ten years of research on the Monterrey-Houston migratory circuit. +HUQiQGH]/HyQ ¶V DQDO\WLFDO OHQV ]RRPV LQ RQ D 0RQWHUUH\ LQGXVWULDO ZRUNLQJ class neighborhood, La Fama, and its counterpart in the Summerland section of +RXVWRQ +LV PHWKRGRORJ\ PL[HV TXDOLWDWLYH DQG TXDQWLWDWLYH WRROV ± ZLWK DQ emphasis on ethnography -and keeps a constant dialogue between the macro and the micro and between the two sides of the border.
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Papers by Mariano Sana