Effective Observational Strategies for Health Survey Interviewers

描述（由申请人提供）：在像全国健康访谈调查（NHIS，目前由美国人口普查局进行）和全国家庭成长调查（NSFG，目前由密歇根大学进行）这样的大型健康调查中，采访者记录的观察结果描述了所有抽样单位的选定特征，这是一种有前途的、具有成本效益的辅助信息来源，调查统计学家可以使用这些信息对调查估计和响应性调查设计进行非响应性调整。采访者是实地调查组织的眼睛和耳朵，有一小部分文献表明，采访者可以成功地记录对抽样单位特征的观察，这些特征与关键调查措施和反应倾向相关。不幸的是，这些观测结果已被证明容易出错，而且越来越多的研究表明，观测误差水平的增加会限制非响应调整的有效性。此外，这一领域的初步工作发现，即使在控制了访谈者和家庭水平的协变量之后，访谈者的观察结果的准确性也存在很大差异。目前还没有研究试图找出这种差异的其他来源。心理学和人类学的文献研究了人类观察中的偏见来源，初步研究表明访谈者在观察策略方面有所不同，受此启发，本研究旨在：1)对NSFG访谈者提供的数千个理由进行定性分析，以证明他们对所有样本NSFG家庭的两个关键特征进行了观察；2)利用聚类分析技术，根据观察策略确定是否存在独特的NSFG访谈者子群体；3)在控制观测精度的其他相关因素的情况下，使用多层次建模技术比较两种观测结果在已确定的采访者亚组中的准确性。拟议研究的成功完成将为健康调查的设计者提供有效观察策略的证据，有助于将采访者观察结果的收集标准化，并展示一种新的研究方法，调查机构可以使用该方法为采访者培训提供信息。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In large health surveys like the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS, currently conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau) and the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG, currently conducted by the University of Michigan), observations that interviewers record describing selected features of all sampled units represent a promising, cost-effective source of auxiliary information that survey statisticians can use for nonresponse adjustment of survey estimates and responsive survey designs. Interviewers are the eyes and ears of the survey organization out in the field, and a small literature has shown that interviewers can successfully record observations on features of sampled units that are correlated with both key survey measures and response propensity. Unfortunately, these observations have been shown to be prone to error, and a growing body of research has demonstrated that increasing levels of error in the observations can limit the effectiveness of nonresponse adjustments. Furthermore, initial work in this area has found that interviewers vary substantially in the accuracy of their observations, even after controlling for interviewer- and household-level covariates. No existing study has attempted to identify additional sources of this variance. Motivated by literature in psychology and anthropology that examines sources of bias in human observation and preliminary work suggesting that interviewers vary in terms of their observational strategies, the proposed research aims to: 1) perform a qualitative analysis of several thousand justifications provided by NSFG interviewers for their observations on two key features of all sampled NSFG households; 2) use cluster analysis techniques to determine whether unique subgroups of NSFG interviewers exist based on the observational strategies evident in their justifications; and 3) use multilevel modeling techniques to compare the accuracy of the two observations among the identified subgroups of interviewers, controlling for other relevant correlates of observation accuracy. Successful completion of the proposed research will provide designers of health surveys with evidence of effective observational strategies that can help to standardize the collection of interviewer observations, and demonstrate a new research methodology that survey agencies can use to inform interviewer training.