New Methods for the Measurement of Occupation

目前，大多数调查都是用开放式问题来询问职业。逐字逐句的回复随后被编码到一个包含数百个类别和数千个工作的分类中，这容易出错、耗时且成本高昂。该项目调查了如何通过在面试中提出依赖于回答的问题来改进这一过程。我们开发了一种职业面试编码工具，并在CATI和CAPI调查中成功地进行了测试。结果是有希望的：55%到85%的文本回复可以用新开发的工具进行编码，没有证据表明使用这个工具会给面试人员和受访者带来额外的负担。在第二个资助阶段，我们的目标是进一步开发这种职业编码方法。为了提高测量的质量和有效性，需要对各种误差源进行深入的分析。对该工具的改进将反映计算机辅助个人访谈、计算机辅助电话访谈和网络调查的具体要求。分析面试者行为的结果将有助于改进培训文件，以最大限度地减少面试者对调查结果的影响。新版本的仪器允许不断改进建议的答案选项。结果将以开放源码软件的形式提供，以便研究人员可以使用我们的仪器进行自己的调查。

Currently, most surveys ask for occupation with open-ended questions. The verbatim responses are coded afterwards into a classification with hundreds of categories and thousands of jobs, which is error-prone, time-consuming and costly. The project investigates how to improve this process by asking response-dependent questions during the interview. We developed an instrument for interview coding of occupations and successfully tested it in a CATI and a CAPI survey. Results are promising: between 55 and 85 percent of the text responses can be coded with the newly developed tool, and there is no evidence that the use of this tool is an additional burden to interviewers and respondents.During the second funding phase we aim to further develop this method of occupation coding. An in-depth analysis of various error sources is required to inform and improve the quality and the validity of measurement. The improvements to the instrument will reflect the specific requirements of computer-assisted personal interviews, computer-assisted telephone interviews and web surveys. Results from analyzing interviewer behavior will inform the improvement of training documents to minimize the influence of interviewers on the survey results. The new version of the instrument allows for continuous improvement of the suggested answer options. The results will be made available in the form of an open source software so that researchers can use our instrument for their own surveys.