NCRM International Visitor Exchange Scheme (IVES)

Developing New Data Collection Methods for Socio-economic Surveys (2015 - 2017)

Dr Mick Couper (mcouper@umich.edu), an expert in survey research methodology from the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan visited the Institute for Socio-Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex. He worked with Dr Annette Jäckle (aejack@essex.ac.uk) on the use of new technologies for data collection, such as new mobile and digital technologies, in longitudinal surveys such as Understanding Society. Large scale social surveys are increasingly interested in using new technologies to complement their existing questionnaires. Using new technologies could provide data on new topics, at a cheaper cost, and potentially with fewer errors. However, only a few surveys have trialled data collection using new technologies. They worked on research addressing some of the barriers to the incorporation of new technologies in data collection around:

concerns about how respondents react to requests for data collection using new technologies and whether this will affect response rates to the main questionnaire,
limited survey budgets that do not allow for development and testing,
a lack of a theoretical framework to guide the understanding of potential error sources
in data collected using new technologies, and
a lack of guidance on best practices for data collection using new technologies.

This IVES project is linked to the NCRM funded project on Understanding household finance through better measurement.

This IVES project is also linked to a CLOSER Innovations project which ran two workshops in which Dr Mick Couper participated: