Measuring race and ethnicity for administrative data sets and then analyzing these data to understand racial/ethnic disparities present many logistical and theoretical challenges. In this chapter, we conduct a synthetic review of studies on how to effectively measure race/ethnicity for administrative data purposes and then utilize these measures…

Mobile technologies, specifically smartphones, offer social scientists a potentially powerful approach to examine the social world. They enable researchers to collect information that was previously unobservable or difficult to measure, expanding the realm of empirical investigation. For research that concerns resource-poor and hard-to-reach…

This article describes issues in measuring school contexts with an eye toward understanding students' experiences and outcomes. I begin with an overview of the conceptual underpinnings related to measuring contexts, briefly describe the initiatives at the National Center for Education Statistics to measure school contexts, and identify possible…

Income is regarded as one of the clearest indicators of socioeconomic status and wellbeing in the developed world and is highly correlated with a wide range of outcomes. Despite its importance, there remains an issue as to the best way to collect income as part of surveys. This paper examines differences in how income is collected in a nationally…

This study compares work time data collected by the German Time Use Survey (GTUS) using the diary method with stylized work time estimates from the GTUS, the German Socio-Economic Panel, and the German Microcensus. Although on average the differences between the time-diary data and the interview data is not large, our results show that significant…

Dallas school district attempted to determine whereabouts of students who did not return to school in fall. Found a large portion of "no-show" students matriculating elsewhere. Previously, these students would have been classified as dropouts and used to determine the dropout rate. The new accounting procedure reduced the annual dropout rate from…

The 'rural' definitions applied by the Federal Government, especially by two data-gathering agencies, the Bureau of the Census and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), emphasize different dimensions of the concept, and delineate the rural-urban continuum in different ways. This report discusses the inconsistency of curent "rural"…

This guide is essentially designed as a teaching aid for those who would inform planners, officials of educational ministries, school administrators, principals, and teachers about educational outcome measurements. In outline and graphic form, the guide presents topics for discussion in a seminar dealing with the application of outcome…