scholarly journals Is There More Than the Answer to the Question? Device Use and Completion Time as Indicators for Selectivity Bias and Response Convenience in Online Surveys

Author(s):  
Jean Philippe Décieux

AbstractThe main objective of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS) is to establish a longitudinal data set that provides information on life trajectories of international migrants. However, a large amount of paradata were also collected in order to obtain meta-information on respondents’ survey participation. This auxiliary information can help to optimize data quality at all stages of the survey process. By continuing the existing discussion in the field of online surveys, this chapter pursues a twofold objective: it reflects device usage (mobile vs. computer) and elucidates determinants of device choice. In particular, it analyses whether selectivity effects due to respondent’s device choices bias the sample. Moreover, this chapter investigates differences in response time between devices to detect differences in response burden. The analysis of response burden differences by device is an important issue, since an increased device-specific response burden can be a predictor of actual and further panel dropouts. In both device-specific selectivity and survey burden, only slight differences were found between mobile and desktop devices. Using these data, the following paper addresses the need to analyse potential sources of survey error and provides evidence that GERPS data do not appear to contain noteworthy bias attributed to device usage.

2020 ◽  
Vol 636 ◽  
pp. A74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trifon Trifonov ◽  
Lev Tal-Or ◽  
Mathias Zechmeister ◽  
Adrian Kaminski ◽  
Shay Zucker ◽  
...  

Context. The High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph has been mounted since 2003 at the ESO 3.6 m telescope in La Silla and provides state-of-the-art stellar radial velocity (RV) measurements with a precision down to ∼1 m s−1. The spectra are extracted with a dedicated data-reduction software (DRS), and the RVs are computed by cross-correlating with a numerical mask. Aims. This study has three main aims: (i) Create easy access to the public HARPS RV data set. (ii) Apply the new public SpEctrum Radial Velocity AnaLyser (SERVAL) pipeline to the spectra, and produce a more precise RV data set. (iii) Determine whether the precision of the RVs can be further improved by correcting for small nightly systematic effects. Methods. For each star observed with HARPS, we downloaded the publicly available spectra from the ESO archive and recomputed the RVs with SERVAL. This was based on fitting each observed spectrum with a high signal-to-noise ratio template created by coadding all the available spectra of that star. We then computed nightly zero-points (NZPs) by averaging the RVs of quiet stars. Results. By analyzing the RVs of the most RV-quiet stars, whose RV scatter is < 5 m s−1, we find that SERVAL RVs are on average more precise than DRS RVs by a few percent. By investigating the NZP time series, we find three significant systematic effects whose magnitude is independent of the software that is used to derive the RV: (i) stochastic variations with a magnitude of ∼1 m s−1; (ii) long-term variations, with a magnitude of ∼1 m s−1 and a typical timescale of a few weeks; and (iii) 20–30 NZPs that significantly deviate by a few m s−1. In addition, we find small (≲1 m s−1) but significant intra-night drifts in DRS RVs before the 2015 intervention, and in SERVAL RVs after it. We confirm that the fibre exchange in 2015 caused a discontinuous RV jump that strongly depends on the spectral type of the observed star: from ∼14 m s−1 for late F-type stars to ∼ − 3 m s−1 for M dwarfs. The combined effect of extracting the RVs with SERVAL and correcting them for the systematics we find is an improved average RV precision: an improvement of ∼5% for spectra taken before the 2015 intervention, and an improvement of ∼15% for spectra taken after it. To demonstrate the quality of the new RV data set, we present an updated orbital solution of the GJ 253 two-planet system. Conclusions. Our NZP-corrected SERVAL RVs can be retrieved from a user-friendly public database. It provides more than 212 000 RVs for about 3000 stars along with much auxiliary information, such as the NZP corrections, various activity indices, and DRS-CCF products.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (11) ◽  
pp. 1351-1362
Author(s):  
Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen ◽  
Asger Andersen ◽  
Kelton Minor ◽  
David Dreyer Lassen

In this study, we monitored 470 university students’ smartphone usage continuously over 2 years to assess the relationship between in-class smartphone use and academic performance. We used a novel data set in which smartphone use and grades were recorded across multiple courses, allowing us to examine this relationship at the student level and the student-in-course level. In accordance with the existing literature, our results showed that students’ in-class smartphone use was negatively associated with their grades, even when we controlled for a broad range of observed student characteristics. However, the magnitude of the association decreased substantially in a fixed-effects model, which leveraged the panel structure of the data to control for all stable student and course characteristics, including those not observed by researchers. This suggests that the size of the effect of smartphone usage on academic performance has been overestimated in studies that controlled for only observed student characteristics.


2018 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura A Langner ◽  
Frank F Furstenberg

Abstract Objective Many studies reveal a gender gap in spousal care during late life. However, this gap could be an artifact of methodological limitations (small and unrepresentative cross-sectional samples). Using a data set that overcomes these limitations, we re-examine the question of gender differences in spousal care and housework adjustment when a serious illness occurs. Method We use biannual waves between 2001 and 2015 of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and growth curve analyses. We follow couples longitudinally (identified in the household questionnaire) to analyze shifts in spousal care hours and housework plus errand hours that occur as a response to the spousal care need. We test for interactions with levels of care need and with gender. Results We found that men increase their care hours as much as women do, resulting in similar care hours. They also increase their housework and errand hours more than women do. Yet at lower levels of spousal care need, women still do more housework and errands because they spent more time doing housework before the illness. Discussion Even in a context of children’s decreasing availability to care for parents, male spouses assume the required caregiving role in systems relying on a mixture of public and private care.


2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (03n04) ◽  
pp. 1850008
Author(s):  
SEUNGKYU SHIN ◽  
JUYONG PARK

In the modern era where highly-commodified cultural products compete heavily for mass consumption, finding the principles behind the complex process of how successful, “hit” products emerge remains a vital scientific goal that requires an interdisciplinary approach. Here, we present a framework for tracing the cycle of prosperity-and-decline of a product to find insights into influential and potent factors that determine its success. As a rapid, high-throughput indicator of the preference of the public, popularity charts have emerged as a useful information source for finding the market performance patterns of products over time, which we call the on-chart life trajectories that show how the products enter the chart, fare inside it, and eventually exit from it. We propose quantitative parameters to characterize a life trajectory, and analyze a large-scale data set of nearly 7,000 songs from Gaon Chart, a major weekly Korean Pop (K-Pop) chart that covers a span of six years. We find that a significant role is played by nonmusical extrinsic factors such as the established fan base of the artist and the might of production companies in the on-chart success of songs, strongly indicative of the commodified nature of modern cultural products. We also review a possible mathematical model of this phenomenon, and discuss several nontrivial yet intriguing trajectories that we call the “Late Bloomers” and the “Re-entrants” that appear to be strongly driven by serendipitous exposure on mass media and the changes of seasons.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhisheng Yang ◽  
Jinyong Cheng

Abstract In recommendation algorithms, data sparsity and cold start problems are always inevitable. In order to solve such problems, researchers apply auxiliary information to recommendation algorithms to mine and obtain more potential information through users' historical records and then improve recommendation performance. This paper proposes a model ST_RippleNet, which combines knowledge graph with deep learning. In this model, users' potential interests are mined in the knowledge graph to stimulate the propagation of users' preferences on the set of knowledge entities. In the propagation of preferences, we adopt a triple-based multi-layer attention mechanism, and the distribution of users' preferences for candidate items formed by users' historical click information is used to predict the final click probability. In ST_RippleNet model, music data set is added to the original movie and book data set, and the improved loss function is applied to the model, which is optimized by RMSProp optimizer. Finally, tanh function is added to predict click probability to improve recommendation performance. Compared with the current mainstream recommendation methods, ST_RippleNet recommendation algorithm has very good performance in AUC and ACC, and has substantial improvement in movie, book and music recommendation.


2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1850154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond MacDermott

This paper tests the pollution-haven hypothesis. A fixed-effects variation of the gravity model is applied to panel data to investigate what relationship, if any, exists between environmental regulations and FDI. The data set focuses on bilateral flows of aggregated foreign direct investment between 26 OECD countries from 1982 to 1997. Use of pollution emissions as a proxy for environmental stringency shows evidence in support of the pollution-haven hypothesis. In other words, firms do seek out countries with weaker environmental regulations for production. In addition, FDI appears to fall with distance. Contrary to expectations, FDI is not influenced by interest rates, wages or GDP.


2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (6) ◽  
pp. 511-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Restorick Roberts ◽  
Kathryn Betts Adams

Quality of life (QoL) in the face of declining health, mobility, and social losses is a central issue for older adults. Our study examined changes in QoL over time for older adults residing in independent senior housing within continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs) and estimated how residents’ social engagement during their first year influenced QoL over the next 4 years. Data were drawn from a 5-year panel study of 267 older adults who moved into senior housing within four CCRCs. Although initial QoL varied between individuals, QoL declined for the group over time. One component of early social engagement—participating in a greater number of formal social activities organized by the CCRC—significantly slowed the rate of decline in QoL. Findings suggest that senior housing residents may benefit from early participation in organized social and leisure activities soon after move-in to forestall declines in QoL over the long term.


2018 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 226-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
DONALD D. SEARING ◽  
WILLIAM G. JACOBY ◽  
ANDREW H. TYNER

How much do the political values of politicians endure throughout their careers? And how might the endurance be explained? This paper uses a unique longitudinal data set to examine the persistence of political values among national politicians: members of the British House of Commons, who completed Rokeach-type value ranking instruments during 1971–73 and again 40 years later in 2012–16. The findings show remarkable stability and provide strong support for the persistence hypothesis which predicts that politicians develop crystallized value systems by their early thirties and largely maintain those values into retirement. This is consistent with the view that rapid changes in aggregate party ideologies have more to do with new views among new waves of recruits than with conversions among old members.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-133
Author(s):  
Michael D. Stackhouse ◽  
Kaustav Misra ◽  
Micah DelVecchio

Purpose International expansion is an inevitable consequence for companies that are seeking revenue growth. Foreign direct investment (FDI) by global enterprises is a common route of such expansion. As companies invest abroad, competing interests cause concerns over the impact (both positive and negative) on the local labor force (necessitating corporate social responsibility) caused by FDI. Therefore, there is a logical link between FDI, a country’s labor force and globalization. The purpose of this study is to explore this untested relationship. Design/methodology/approach This panel study uses cross-country data from the World Bank to understand the pattern of influence of globalization on worker injury. A secondary data set of 36 developed and developing countries from 2003 to 2007 are gathered for this paper to analyze. Findings The results of this paper indicate that, companies are seeking to maintain higher levels of social responsibility should not only consider a framework such as ISO 26000 themselves but also they should encourage compliance from their upstream suppliers as well. Originality/value Goods for these companies are manufactured in Bangladesh, but unfortunately, a serious tragedy occurred when a building collapsed, resulting in the death of 1,127 people, which was not the first of such events in Bangladesh (The Associated Press, 2013). Inspired by this recent tragedy, this study examines possible connections between globalization and the factors that are associated with the incidences of worker injury. Globalization is a well-studied phenomenon, however very little has been done to examine its impact on worker injuries; this paper helps fill that gap.


2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac William Martin ◽  
Kevin Beck

Scholars have long argued that gentrification may displace long-term homeowners by causing their property taxes to increase, and policy makers, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have cited this argument as a justification for state laws that limit the increase of residential property taxes. We test the hypotheses that gentrification directly displaces homeowners by increasing their property taxes, and that property tax limitation protects residents of gentrifying neighborhoods from displacement, by merging the Panel Study of Income Dynamics with a decennial Census-tract-level measure of gentrification and a new data set on state-level property tax policy covering the period 1987 to 2009. We find some evidence that property tax pressure can trigger involuntary moves by homeowners, but no evidence that such displacement is more common in gentrifying neighborhoods than elsewhere, nor that property tax limitation protects long-term homeowners in gentrifying neighborhoods. We do find evidence that gentrification directly displaces renters.


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