Tag Archives: survey

November 20, 2014 · 12:00 pm

Education questions in ACS

There is a proposal to drop some questions from the American Community Survey (ACS), and I was planning to use one of them in a project I’m trying to get started. I hope they keep it.
http://news.sciencemag.org/education/2014/11/can-question-no-12-survive-researchers-fight-retain-question-about-college-degrees

“I know there’s a lot of angst in the community right now,” Treat says. “But I think there’s a lack of understanding that the survey is under attack. So I encourage everybody to respond to the notice. The more responses we get, the better understanding there will be about the value of collecting this information.”

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June 23, 2011 · 6:00 am

Age-heaping and Hedgehogs

I heard an interesting talk a few weeks ago about “age-heaping” in survey responses, the phenomenon where people remember ages imprecisely and say that their siblings are ages that are divisible by 5 much more often than expected.  There are some nice theory challenges here, with a big dose of stats modeling, but I’ll have to share some more thoughts on that later.

In the talk, the age-heaping was also referred to a a hedgehog or porcupine plot, because of the spikey histogram that the data produces.  I was looking for a nice picture of one, or some additional background reading, and when I searched for “hedgehog statistical plots”, all google would give me was a bunch of pages about stats on actual hedgehogs.  Cute!

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July 26, 2010 · 10:38 pm

The GBD 2010 Health Measurement Survey is here

Have you got 15 minutes for science? Take this strange survey that I’ve been excited about for the last two years. I’ve been calling it the Disability Weights Survey, but now that it’s all professionally implemented and communications-department approved, it is officially the GBD 2010 Health Measurement Survey.

The survey is part of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2010 led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, in collaboration with four other leading institutions: Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Queensland, and the World Health Organization.

Our goal is to collect responses from at least 50,000 people worldwide. Please consider sharing this and encouraging participation within your organization. In addition, we would ask you to consider forwarding information about this survey to colleagues and contacts outside your organization who might be interested in participating.

The survey takes about 15 minutes to complete. Participation is completely voluntary and anonymous. In the near future, we hope to translate the survey into additional languages.

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