Open AccessResponse Behavior and Quality of Survey Data: Comparing Elderly Respondents in Institutions and Private Households
Author(s) -
Jan-Lucas Schanze
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
sociological methods and research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.468
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1552-8294
pISSN - 0049-1241
DOI - 10.1177/0049124121995534
Subject(s) - survey data collection , quality (philosophy) , general social survey , matching (statistics) , health and retirement study , confounding , propensity score matching , psychology , gerontology , demographic economics , data quality , environmental health , medicine , business , social psychology , economics , marketing , statistics , philosophy , metric (unit) , mathematics , epistemology , pathology
An increasing age of respondents and cognitive impairment are usual suspects for increasing difficulties in survey interviews and a decreasing data quality. This is why survey researchers tend to label residents in retirement and nursing homes as hard-to-interview and exclude them from most social surveys. In this article, I examine to what extent this label is justified and whether quality of data collected among residents in institutions for the elderly really differs from data collected within private households. For this purpose, I analyze the response behavior and quality indicators in three waves of Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. To control for confounding variables, I use propensity score matching to identify respondents in private households who share similar characteristics with institutionalized residents. My results confirm that most indicators of response behavior and data quality are worse in institutions compared to private households. However, when controlling for sociodemographic and health-related variables, differences get very small. These results suggest the importance of health for the data quality irrespective of the housing situation.