Panel Conditioning Effects in Longitudinal Social Science Surveys

纵向(或小组)调查在确定因果关系和理解随时间展开的过程方面提供了很大的方法杠杆。尽管纵向调查在无数的学术和应用领域具有巨大的研究价值，但它也提出了各种独特的方法学问题。这些问题中最不为人所知的是“小组条件反射”，即当参与一波纵向研究改变了受访者随后对他们的态度和/或行为的报告时引入的偏见。如果参与纵向调查改变了参与者对随后的态度和/或行为调查问题的反应，那么这就让人质疑从任何数量的广泛使用的数据资源中获得的信息的有效性。研究人员将使用一项实验研究设计，并对面板磨损进行修正，并对广泛的态度和行为测量数据进行测试，以验证一系列理论推导的假设，这些假设是关于在什么情况下条件反射效应应该最严重的。评估面板条件反射效应大小的基本研究设计包括对被随机分配到自1988年以来反复接受采访的治疗组或从未接受过采访的对照组的个人进行邮寄调查。由于不同衡量标准在年度纵向调查中出现的频率不同，以及受访者参与这些调查的频率的异质性，使“治疗”的确切性质变得复杂起来。近几十年来，主要的联邦、地方和私人资助机构花费了数百万美元投资于纵向小组调查。这项投资的动机是希望更好地理解因果过程，并更多地了解随着时间推移而展开的过程。几乎所有社会科学学科都依赖于这样的数据。尽管研究人员已经仔细开发了研究方法和统计技术来解释与纵向研究相关的一些问题(如面板磨损)，但对面板调节知之甚少。这个项目的结果将极大地提高我们对面板调节效应的大小的理解，以及我们对纵向调查数据的使用者在什么情况下应该关注这种形式的偏差的了解。

Longitudinal (or panel) surveys provide great methodological leverage in establishing causality and in understanding processes that unfold over time. Despite their tremendous value for research in innumerable academic and applied fields, longitudinal surveys also present a variety of unique methodological problems. Among the least well understood of these problems is known as "panel conditioning," or bias introduced when participation in one wave of a longitudinal study alters respondents' subsequent reports of their attitudes and/or behaviors. If partaking in a longitudinal survey alters participants' responses to subsequent attitudinal and/or behavioral survey questions, then this calls into question the validity of information derived from any number of widely used data resources. The investigator will use an experimental research design with corrections for panel attrition and data on a wide range of attitudinal and behavioral measures to test a series of theoretically derived hypotheses about the circumstances under which conditioning effects should be most severe. The basic research design for assessing the magnitude of panel conditioning effects involves conducting a mail survey of individuals who were assigned, at random, to either a treatment group that has been interviewed repeatedly since 1988 or to a control group that has never been interviewed. The precise nature of the "treatment" is complicated by differences across measures in how frequently they have appeared on the annual longitudinal surveys and by heterogeneity across respondents in how frequently they have participated in those surveys.Major federal, local, and private funding agencies have spent many millions of dollars in recent decades to invest in longitudinal panel surveys. This investment is motivated by the desire to better understand causal processes and to learn more about processes that unfold over time. Nearly all social science disciplines rely on such data. Although researchers have carefully developed research methods and statistical techniques to account for some problems associated with longitudinal research (such as panel attrition), very little is known about panel conditioning. The results of this project will vastly improve our understanding of the magnitude of panel conditioning effects as well as our knowledge about the circumstances under which users of longitudinal survey data should be concerned about this form of bias.