Conducting survey research in rural educational contexts presents unique challenges and requires specific methodological considerations. This article provides an overview of potential adaptations that may help support effective, valid, and impactful rural survey research and a brief review of survey research published in "Rural Special…

This case study focuses on a multidecade time-series study of changes in public acceptance of evolution in the United States. Change over time is often a central issue in social science research. There are two kinds of change over time. Time-series studies address change in populations or groups over time. Longitudinal studies address changes in…

This paper investigates the methodological discrepancies underlying the measurement of adult learning and education (ALE) participation in the UK by focusing on four major surveys -- APiL, PIAAC, AES, and LFS. Grounded in the Total Survey Error (TSE) framework, we systematically examined the surveys' documentation and compared their definitions,…

Previous research extensively studied reasons for and ways to avoid low response rates, but it largely ignored the primary research issue of the degree to which response rates matter, which we address. Methodological survey research on response rates has been concerned with how to increase responsiveness and with the effects of response rates on…

This study examined the feasibility of conducting a follow-up survey of panel attriters as a panel maintenance measure to investigate respondents' reasons for attrition, assessing their willingness to rejoin, and updating their addresses. We surveyed FReDA panelists who had not participated in two consecutive subwaves and were excluded from the…

Indirect questioning techniques such as the randomized response technique aim to control social desirability bias in surveys of sensitive topics. To improve upon previous indirect questioning techniques, we propose the new Cheating Detection Triangular Model. Similar to the Cheating Detection Model, it includes a mechanism for detecting…

Insufficient effort responding (IER) refers to a lack of effort when answering survey or questionnaire items. Such items typically offer more than two ordered response categories, with Likert-type scales as the most prominent example. The underlying assumption is that the successive categories reflect increasing levels of the latent variable…

This study analyzes the consequences of item nonresponse to the question about a household's total net income in the European Social Survey (2008-2018). We recognize two mechanisms in avoiding answering the income question: task complexity and question sensitivity, and apply multilevel logistic regressions to predict the probability of refusals or…

Address-based sampling (ABS) refers to the use a list of addresses derived from the U.S. Postal Service's Computerized Delivery Sequence File as a sampling frame. While most residential addresses are included on an ABS frame, it still suffers from undercoverage. Undercoverage is problematic only if the uncovered units have different attributes…

Randomized response techniques (RRTs) are useful survey tools for estimating the prevalence of sensitive issues, such as the prevalence of doping in elite sports. One type of RRT, the unrelated question model (UQM), has become widely used because of its psychological acceptability for study participants and its favorable statistical properties.…

Preventing panel members from attriting is a fundamental challenge for panel surveys. Research has shown that response behavior in earlier waves (response or nonresponse) is a good predictor of panelists' response behavior in upcoming waves. However, response behavior can be described in greater detail by considering the time until the response is…

Nonresponse bias is a widely prevalent problem for data on education. We develop a ten-step exemplar to guide nonresponse bias analysis (NRBA) in cross-sectional studies and apply these steps to the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011. A key step is the construction of indices of nonresponse bias based on proxy…

The exposure of scientific scandals and the increase of dubious research practices have generated a stream of studies on Questionable Research Practices (QRPs), such as failure to acknowledge co-authors, selective presentation of findings, or removal of data not supporting desired outcomes. In contrast to high-profile fraud cases, QRPs can be…

Conducting research with one's students as participants can have various challenges. We describe one particular challenge we have encountered when conducting research surveys with participants who had been students of a doctoral course taught by us. Some participants gave course feedback in the research. This may indicate blurring of the roles of…

This article details the challenges we faced in collecting sensitive information in an ethnically and religiously divided community that has experienced recent violence. The discussion is based on a summer 2016 survey experiment we conducted in Jos, Nigeria, to gather information regarding residents' perceptions of local communal violence. We…