CRM/LAW C167 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: The Literary Digest, Sampling Bias

• School: UC-Irvine
• Department: Criminology, Law and Society
• Course: CRM/LAW C167
• Professor: Richard Mc Cleary

Document Summary

Going through revolutionary change since people no longer answer their phones. Mail questionnaire: get a question in the mail and you"re asked to complete it. Phone interview: get a telephone call and get asked some questions. Response rates in the middle of the 1970s, were around 80-90% Now the response rate is something around 10% Considerations (how to design a survey); each method has its own (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) strengths and weaknesses. Cost: very expensive to do samples. Biases: we don"t want to get a biased sample, textbook example = 1932 literary digest survey of presidential voting habits. Security of respondent: we want to guarantee the respondent privacy. Accessibility: we want to be able to gain access to everybody in our sample frame, either by phone or in person. Depth of responses: how rich are our responses going to be. Ncvs uses all three methods for the households.