Survey Research

How surveys work and a variety of methods to use with surveys. Surveys for estimating death rates, why election polls are so variable when the vote is so predictable, and health inequality.

Aaron Kaufman, Gary King, and Mayya Komisarchik. Working Paper. “How to Measure Legislative District Compactness If You Only Know it When You See It”.Abstract

Paper

To prevent gerrymandering, and to impose a specific form of democratic representation, many state constitutions and judicial opinions require US legislative districts to be "compact." Yet, the law offers few precise definitions other than "you know it when you see it," which effectively implies a common understanding of the concept. In contrast, academics have shown that the concept has multiple theoretical dimensions and have generated large numbers of conflicting empirical measures. This has proved extremely challenging for courts tasked with adjudicating compactness. We hypothesize that both are correct --- that compactness is complex and multidimensional, but a common understanding exists across people. We develop a survey design to elicit this understanding, without bias in favor of one's own political views, and with high levels of reliability (in data where the standard paired comparisons approach fails). We then create a statistical model that predicts, with high accuracy and solely from the geometric features of the district, compactness evaluations by 96 judges, justices, and public officials responsible for redistricting (and 102 redistricting consultants, expert witnesses, law professors, law students, graduate students, undergraduates, and Mechanical Turk workers). We also offer data on compactness from our validated measure for 18,215 state legislative and congressional districts, as well as software to compute this measure from any district. We then discuss what may be the wider applicability of our general methodological approach to measuring important concepts that you only know when you see.

Andrew Gelman and Gary King. 1993. “Why are American Presidential Election Campaign Polls so Variable when Votes are so Predictable?” British Journal of Political Science, 23, Pp. 409–451.Abstract

Article

As most political scientists know, the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election can be predicted within a few percentage points (in the popular vote), based on information available months before the election. Thus, the general election campaign for president seems irrelevant to the outcome (except in very close elections), despite all the media coverage of campaign strategy. However, it is also well known that the pre-election opinion polls can vary wildly over the campaign, and this variation is generally attributed to events in the campaign. How can campaign events affect people’s opinions on whom they plan to vote for, and yet not affect the outcome of the election? For that matter, why do voters consistently increase their support for a candidate during his nominating convention, even though the conventions are almost entirely predictable events whose effects can be rationally forecast? In this exploratory study, we consider several intuitively appealing, but ultimately wrong, resolutions to this puzzle, and discuss our current understanding of what causes opinion polls to fluctuate and yet reach a predictable outcome. Our evidence is based on graphical presentation and analysis of over 67,000 individual-level responses from forty-nine commercial polls during the 1988 campaign and many other aggregate poll results from the 1952–1992 campaigns. We show that responses to pollsters during the campaign are not generally informed or even, in a sense we describe, "rational." In contrast, voters decide which candidate to eventually support based on their enlightened preferences, as formed by the information they have learned during the campaign, as well as basic political cues such as ideology and party identification. We cannot prove this conclusion, but we do show that it is consistent with the aggregate forecasts and individual-level opinion poll responses. Based on the enlightened preferences hypothesis, we conclude that the news media have an important effect on the outcome of Presidential elections–-not due to misleading advertisements, sound bites, or spin doctors, but rather by conveying candidates’ positions on important issues.

D. Steven Voss, Andrew Gelman, and Gary King. 1995. “Pre-Election Survey Methodology: Details From Nine Polling Organizations, 1988 and 1992.” Public Opinion Quarterly, 59, Pp. 98–132.Abstract

Article

Before every presidential election, journalists, pollsters, and politicians commission dozens of public opinion polls. Although the primary function of these surveys is to forecast the election winners, they also generate a wealth of political data valuable even after the election. These preelection polls are useful because they are conducted with such frequency that they allow researchers to study change in estimates of voter opinion within very narrow time increments (Gelman and King 1993). Additionally, so many are conducted that the cumulative sample size of these polls is large enough to construct aggregate measures of public opinion within small demographic or geographical groupings (Wright, Erikson, and McIver 1985).

Anchoring Vignettes (for interpersonal incomparability) Methods for interpersonal incomparability, when respondents (from different cultures, genders, countries, or ethnic groups) understand survey questions in different ways; for developing theoretical definitions of complicated concepts apparently definable only by example (i.e., "you know it when you see it").: Website

Imputing Missing Data due to survey nonresponse: Website

Analyzing Rare Events, including rare survey outcomes and alternative methods of sampling for rare events: Website

Gary King and Ying Lu. 2008. “Verbal Autopsy Methods with Multiple Causes of Death.” Statistical Science, 23, Pp. 78–91.Abstract

Article

Verbal autopsy procedures are widely used for estimating cause-specific mortality in areas without medical death certification. Data on symptoms reported by caregivers along with the cause of death are collected from a medical facility, and the cause-of-death distribution is estimated in the population where only symptom data are available. Current approaches analyze only one cause at a time, involve assumptions judged difficult or impossible to satisfy, and require expensive, time consuming, or unreliable physician reviews, expert algorithms, or parametric statistical models. By generalizing current approaches to analyze multiple causes, we show how most of the difficult assumptions underlying existing methods can be dropped. These generalizations also make physician review, expert algorithms, and parametric statistical assumptions unnecessary. With theoretical results, and empirical analyses in data from China and Tanzania, we illustrate the accuracy of this approach. While no method of analyzing verbal autopsy data, including the more computationally intensive approach offered here, can give accurate estimates in all circumstances, the procedure offered is conceptually simpler, less expensive, more general, as or more replicable, and easier to use in practice than existing approaches. We also show how our focus on estimating aggregate proportions, which are the quantities of primary interest in verbal autopsy studies, may also greatly reduce the assumptions necessary, and thus improve the performance of, many individual classifiers in this and other areas. As a companion to this paper, we also offer easy-to-use software that implements the methods discussed herein.

Gary King, Ying Lu, and Kenji Shibuya. 2010. “Designing Verbal Autopsy Studies.” Population Health Metrics, 8, 19.Abstract

Article

Background: Verbal autopsy analyses are widely used for estimating cause-specific mortality rates (CSMR) in the vast majority of the world without high quality medical death registration. Verbal autopsies -- survey interviews with the caretakers of imminent decedents -- stand in for medical examinations or physical autopsies, which are infeasible or culturally prohibited. Methods and Findings: We introduce methods, simulations, and interpretations that can improve the design of automated, data-derived estimates of CSMRs, building on a new approach by King and Lu (2008). Our results generate advice for choosing symptom questions and sample sizes that is easier to satisfy than existing practices. For example, most prior effort has been devoted to searching for symptoms with high sensitivity and specificity, which has rarely if ever succeeded with multiple causes of death. In contrast, our approach makes this search irrelevant because it can produce unbiased estimates even with symptoms that have very low sensitivity and specificity. In addition, the new method is optimized for survey questions caretakers can easily answer rather than questions physicians would ask themselves. We also offer an automated method of weeding out biased symptom questions and advice on how to choose the number of causes of death, symptom questions to ask, and observations to collect, among others. Conclusions: With the advice offered here, researchers should be able to design verbal autopsy surveys and conduct analyses with greatly reduced statistical biases and research costs.

Emmanuela Gakidou and Gary King. 2006. “Death by Survey: Estimating Adult Mortality without Selection Bias from Sibling Survival Data.” Demography, 43, Pp. 569–585.Abstract

Article

The widely used methods for estimating adult mortality rates from sample survey responses about the survival of siblings, parents, spouses, and others depend crucially on an assumption that we demonstrate does not hold in real data. We show that when this assumption is violated – so that the mortality rate varies with sibship size – mortality estimates can be massively biased. By using insights from work on the statistical analysis of selection bias, survey weighting, and extrapolation problems, we propose a new and relatively simple method of recovering the mortality rate with both greatly reduced potential for bias and increased clarity about the source of necessary assumptions.

Emmanuela Gakidou and Gary King. 2002. “Measuring Total Health Inequality: Adding Individual Variation to Group-Level Differences.” BioMed Central: International Journal for Equity in Health, 1.Abstract

Article

Background: Studies have revealed large variations in average health status across social, economic, and other groups. No study exists on the distribution of the risk of ill-health across individuals, either within groups or across all people in a society, and as such a crucial piece of total health inequality has been overlooked. Some of the reason for this neglect has been that the risk of death, which forms the basis for most measures, is impossible to observe directly and difficult to estimate. Methods: We develop a measure of total health inequality – encompassing all inequalities among people in a society, including variation between and within groups – by adapting a beta-binomial regression model. We apply it to children under age two in 50 low- and middle-income countries. Our method has been adopted by the World Health Organization and is being implemented in surveys around the world and preliminary estimates have appeared in the World Health Report (2000). Results: Countries with similar average child mortality differ considerably in total health inequality. Liberia and Mozambique have the largest inequalities in child survival, while Colombia, the Philippines and Kazakhstan have the lowest levels among the countries measured. Conclusions: Total health inequality estimates should be routinely reported alongside average levels of health in populations and groups, as they reveal important policy-related information not otherwise knowable. This approach enables meaningful comparisons of inequality across countries and future analyses of the determinants of inequality.

Survey Research

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