Tag Archives: translation

The surprising unpredictability of language in use

This morning I recieved an e-mail from an international professional association that I belong to. The e-mail was in English, but it was not written by an American. As a linguist, I recognized the differences in formality and word use as signs that the person who wrote the e-mail is speaking from a set of experiences with English that differ from my own. Nothing in the e-mail was grammatically incorrect (although as a linguist I am hesitant to judge any linguistic differences as correct or incorrect, especially out of context).

Then later this afternoon I saw a tweet from Twitter on the correct use of Twitter abbreviations (RT, MT, etc.). If the growth of new Twitter users has indeed leveled off then Twitter is lucky, because the more Twitter grows the less they will be able to influence the language use of their base.

Language is a living entity that grows, evolves and takes shape based on individual experiences and individual perceptions of language use. If you think carefully about your experiences with language learning, you will quickly see that single exposures and dictionary definitions teach you little, but repeated viewings across contexts teach you much more about language.

Language use is patterned. Every word combination has a likelihood of appearing together, and that likelihood varies based on a host of contextual factors. Language use is complex. We use words in a variety of ways across a variety of contexts. These facts make language interesting, but they also obscure language use from casual understanding. The complicated nature of language in use interferes with analysts who build assumptions about language into their research strategies without realizing that their assumptions would not stand up to careful observation or study.

I would advise anyone involved in the study of language use (either as a primary or secondary aspect of their analysis) to take language use seriously. Fortunately, linguistics is fun and language is everywhere. So hop to it!

Reporting on the AAPOR 69th national conference in Anaheim #aapor

Last week AAPOR held it’s 69th annual conference in sunny (and hot) Anaheim California.

Palm Trees in the conference center area

My biggest takeaway from this year’s conference is that AAPOR is a very healthy organization. AAPOR attendees were genuinely happy to be at the conference, enthusiastic about AAPOR and excited about the conference material. Many participants consider AAPOR their intellectual and professional home base and really relished the opportunity to be around kindred spirits (often socially awkward professionals who are genuinely excited about our niche). All of the presentations I saw firsthand or heard about were solid and dense, and the presenters were excited about their work and their findings. Membership, conference attendance, journal and conference submissions and volunteer participation are all quite strong.

 

At this point in time, the field of survey research is encountering a set of challenges. Nonresponse is a growing challenge, and other forms of data and analysis are increasingly en vogue. I was really excited to see that AAPOR members are greeting these challenges and others head on. For this particular write-up, I will focus on these two challenges. I hope that others will address some of the other main conference themes and add their notes and resources to those I’ve gathered below.

 

As survey nonresponse becomes more of a challenge, survey researchers are moving from traditional measures of response quality (e.g. response rates) to newer measures (e.g. nonresponse bias). Researchers are increasingly anchoring their discussions about survey quality within the Total Survey Error framework, which offers a contextual basis for understanding the problem more deeply. Instead of focusing on an across the board rise in response rates, researchers are strategizing their resources with the goal of reducing response bias. This includes understanding response propensity (who is likely not to respond to the survey? Who is most likely to drop out of a panel study? What are some of the barriers to survey participation?), looking for substantive measures that correlate with response propensity (e.g. Are small, rural private schools less likely to respond to a school survey? Are substance users less likely to respond to a survey about substance abuse?), and continuous monitoring of paradata during the collection period (e.g. developing differential strategies by disposition code, focusing the most successful interviewers on the most reluctant cases, or concentrating collection strategies where they are expected to be most effective). This area of strategizing emerged in AAPOR circles a few years ago with discussions of nonresponse propensity modeling, a process which is surely much more accessible than it sounds, but it has really evolved into a practical and useful tool that can help any size research shop increase survey quality and lower costs.

 

Another big takeaway for me was the volume of discussions and presentations that spoke to the fast-emerging world of data science and big data. Many people spoke of the importance of our voice in the realm of data science, particularly with our professional focus on understanding and mitigating errors in the research process. A few practitioners applied error frameworks to analyses of organic data, and some talks were based on analyses of organic data. This year AAPOR also sponsored a research hack to investigate the potential for Instagram as a research tool for Feed the Hungry. These discussions, presentations and activities made it clear that AAPOR will continue to have a strong voice in the changing research environment, and the task force reports and initiatives from both the membership and education committees reinforced AAPOR’s ability to be right on top of the many changes afoot. I’m eager to see AAPOR’s changing role take shape.

“If you had asked social scientists even 20 years ago what powers they dreamed of acquiring, they might have cited the capacity to track the behaviors, purchases, movements, interactions, and thoughts of whole cities of people, in real time.” – N.A.  Christakis. 24 June 2011. New York Times, via Craig Hill (RTI)

 

AAPOR a very strong, well-loved organization and it is building a very strong future from a very solid foundation.

 

 

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MORE DETAILED NOTES:

This conference is huge, so I could not possibly cover all of it on my own, so I will try to share my notes as well as the notes and resources I can collect from other attendees. If you have any materials to share, please send them to me! The more information I am able to collect here, the better a resource it will be for people interested in the AAPOR or the conference-

 

Patrick Ruffini assembled the tweets from the conference into this storify

 

Annie, the blogger behind LoveStats, had quite a few posts from the conference. I sat on a panel with Annie on the role of blogs in public opinion research (organized by Joe Murphy for the 68th annual AAPOR conference), and Annie blew me away by live-blogging the event from the stage! Clearly, she is the fastest blogger in the West and the East! Her posts from Anaheim included:

Your Significance Test Proves Nothing

Do panel companies manage their panels?

Gender bias among AAPOR presenters

What I hate about you AAPOR

How to correct scale distribution errors

What I like about you AAPOR

I poo poo on your significance tests

When is survey burden the fault of the responders?

How many survey contacts is enough?

 

My full notes are available here (please excuse any formatting irregularities). Unfortunately, they are not as extensive as I would have liked, because wifi and power were in short supply. I also wish I had settled into a better seat and covered some of the talks in greater detail, including Don Dillman’s talk, which was a real highlights of the conference!

I believe Rob Santos’ professional address will be available for viewing or listening soon, if it is not already available. He is a very eloquent speaker, and he made some really great points, so this will be well worth your time.

 

Great description of a census at Kakuma refugee camp

It’s always fun for a professional survey researcher to stumble upon a great pop cultural reference to a survey. Yesterday I heard a great description of a census taken at Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. The description was in the book I’m currently reading: What Is the What by Dave Eggers (great book, I highly recommend it!). The book itself is fiction, loosely based on a true story, so this account likely stems from a combination of observation and imagination. The account reminds me of some of the field reports and ethnographic findings in other intercultural survey efforts, both national (US census) and inter or multinational.

To set the stage, Achak is the main character and narrator of the story. He is one of the “lost boys” of Sudan, and he found his way to Kakuma after a long and storied escape from his war-ravaged hometown. At Kakuma he was taken in by another Denka man, named Gop, who is acting as a kind of father to Achak.

What is the What by Dave Eggers

What is the What by Dave Eggers

“The announcement of the census was made while Gop was waiting for the coming of his wife and daughters, and this complicated his peace of mind. To serve us, to feed us, the UNHCR and Kakuma’s many aid groups needed to know how many refugees were at the camp. Thus, in 1994 they announced they would count us. It would only take a few days, they said. To the organizers I am sure it seemed a very simple, necessary, and uncontroversial directive. But for the Sudanese elders, it was anything but.

—What do you think they have planned? Gop Chol wondered aloud.

I didn’t know what he meant by this, but soon I understood what had him, and the majority of Sudanese elders, greatly concerned. Some learned elders were reminded of the colonial era, when Africans were made to bear badges of identification on their necks.

—Could this counting be a pretext of a new colonial period? Gop mused.—It’s very possible.
Probable even!

I said nothing.

At the same time, there were practical, less symbolic, reasons to oppose the census, including the fact that many elders imagined that it would decrease, not increase, our rations. If they discovered there were fewer of us than had been assumed, the food donations from the rest of the world would drop. The more pressing and widespread fear among young and old at Kakuma was that the census would be a way for the UN to kill us all. These fears were only exacerbated when the fences were erected.

The UN workers had begun to assemble barriers, six feet tall and arranged like hallways. The fences would ensure that we would walk single file on our way to be counted, and thus counted only once. Even those among us, the younger Sudanese primarily, who were not so worried until then, became gravely concerned when the fences went up. It was a malevolent-looking thing, that maze of fencing, orange and opaque. Soon even the best educated among us bought into the suspicion that this was a plan to eliminate the Dinka. Most of the Sudanese my age had learned of the Holocaust, and were convinced that this was a plan much like that used to eliminate the Jews in Germany and Poland. I was dubious of the growing paranoia, but Gop was a believer. As rational a man as he was, he had a long memory for injustices visited upon the people of Sudan.

—What isn’t possible, boy? he demanded.—See where we are? You tell me what isn’t possible at this time in Africa!

But I had no reason to distrust the UN. They had been feeding us at Kakuma for years. There was not enough food, but they were the ones providing for everyone, and thus it seemed nonsensical that they would kill us after all this time.

—Yes, he reasoned,—but see, perhaps now the food has run out. The food is gone, there’s no more money, and Khartoum has paid the UN to kill us. So the UN gets two things: they get to save food, and they are paid to get rid of us.

—But how will they get away with it?

—That’s easy, Achak. They say that we caught a disease only the Dinka can get. There are always illnesses unique to certain people, and this is what will happen. They’ll say there was a Dinka plague, and that all the Sudanese are dead. This is how they’ll justify killing every last one of us.
—That’s impossible, I said.

—Is it? he asked.—Was Rwanda impossible?

I still thought that Gop’s theory was unreliable, but I also knew that I should not forget that there were a great number of people who would be happy if the Dinka were dead. So for a few days, I did not make up my mind about the head count. Meanwhile, public sentiment was solidifying against our participation, especially when it was revealed that the fingers of all those counted, after being counted, would be dipped in ink.

—Why the ink? Gop asked. I didn’t know.

—The ink is a fail-safe measure to ensure the Sudanese will be exterminated.

I said nothing, and he elaborated. Surely if the UN did not kill us Dinka while in the lines, he theorized, they would kill us with this ink on the fingers. How could the ink be removed? It would, he thought, enter our bodies when we ate.

—This seems very much like what they did to the Jews, Gop said.

People spoke a lot about the Jews in those days, which was odd, considering that a short time before, most of the boys I knew thought the Jews were an extinct race. Before we learned about the Holocaust in school, in church we had been taught rather crudely that the Jews had aided in the killing of Jesus Christ. In those teachings, it was never intimated that the Jews were a people still inhabiting the earth. We thought of them as mythological creatures who did not exist outside the stories of the Bible. The night before the census, the entire series of fences, almost a mile long, was torn down. No one took responsibility, but many were quietly satisfied.

In the end, after countless meetings with the Kenyan leadership at the camp, the Sudanese elders were convinced that the head count was legitimate and was needed to provide better services to the refugees. The fences were rebuilt, and the census was conducted a few weeks later. But in a way, those who feared the census were correct, in that nothing very good came from it. After the count, there was less food, fewer services, even the departure of a few smaller programs. When they were done counting, the population of Kakuma had decreased by eight thousand people in one day.

How had the UNHCR miscounted our numbers before the census? The answer is called recycling.

Recycling was popular at Kakuma and is favored at most refugee camps, and any refugee anywhere in the world is familiar with the concept, even if they have a different name for it. The essence of the idea is that one can leave the camp and re-enter as a different person, thus keeping his first ration card and getting another when he enters again under a new name. This means that the recycler can eat twice as much as he did before, or, if he chooses to trade the extra rations, he can buy or otherwise obtain anything else he needs and is not being given by the UN—sugar, meat, vegetables. The trading resulting from extra ration cards provided the basis for a vast secondary economy at Kakuma, and kept thousands of refugees from anemia and related illnesses. At any given time, the administrators of Kakuma thought they were feeding eight thousand more people than they actually were. No one felt guilty about this small numerical deception.

The ration-card economy made commerce possible, and the ability of different groups to manipulate and thrive within the system led soon enough to a sort of social hierarchy at Kakuma.”

Reflections and Notes from the Sentiment Analysis Symposium #SAS14

The Sentiment Analysis Symposium took place in NY this week in the beautiful offices of the New York Academy of Sciences. The Symposium was framed as a transition into a new era of sentiment analysis, an era of human analytics or humetrics.

The view from the New York Academy of Sciences is really stunning!

The view from the New York Academy of Sciences is really stunning!

Two main points that struck me during the event. One is that context is extremely important for developing high quality analytics, but the actual shape that “context” takes varies greatly. The second is a seeming disconnect between the product developers, who are eagerly developing new and better measures, and the customers, who want better usability, more customer support, more customized metrics that fit their preexisting analytic frameworks and a better understanding of why social media analysis is worth their time, effort and money.

Below is a summary of some of the key points. My detailed notes from each of the speakers, can be viewed here. I attended both the more technical Technology and Innovation Session and the Symposium itself.

Context is in. But what is context?

The big takeaway from the Technology and Innovation session, which was then carried into the second day of the Sentiment Analysis Symposium was that context is important. But context was defined in a number of different ways.

 

New measures are coming, and old measures are improving.

The innovative new strategies presented at the Symposium made for really amazing presentations. New measures include voice intonation, facial expressions via remote video connections, measures of galvanic skin response, self tagged sentiment data from social media sharing sites, a variety of measures from people who have embraced the “quantified self” movement, metadata from cellphone connections (including location, etc.), behavioral patterning on the individual and group level, and quite a bit of network analysis. Some speakers showcased systems that involved a variety of linked data or highly visual analytic components. Each of these measures increase the accuracy of preexisting measures and complicate their implementation, bringing new sets of challenges to the industry.

Here is a networked representation of the emotion transition dynamics of 'Hopeful'

Here is a networked representation of the emotion transition dynamics of ‘Hopeful’

This software package is calculating emotional reactions to a Youtube video that is both funny and mean

This software package is calculating emotional reactions to a Youtube video that is both funny and mean

Meanwhile, traditional text-based sentiment analyses are also improving. Both the quality of machine learning algorithms and the quality of rule based systems are improving quickly. New strategies include looking at text data pragmatically (e.g. What are common linguistics patterns in specific goal directed behavior strategies?), gaining domain level specificity, adding steps for genre detection to increase accuracy and looking across languages. New analytic strategies are integrated into algorithms and complementary suites of algorithms are implemented as ensembles. Multilingual analysis is a particular challenge to ML techniques, but can be achieved with a high degree of accuracy using rule based techniques. The attendees appeared to agree that rule based systems are much more accurate that machine learning algorithms, but the time and expertise involved has caused them to come out of vogue.

 

“The industry as a whole needs to grow up”

I suspect that Chris Boudreaux of Accenture shocked the room when he said “the industry as a whole really needs to grow up.” Speaking off the cuff, without his slides after a mishap and adventure, Boudreaux gave the customer point of view toward social media analytics. He said said that social media analysis needs to be more reliable, accessible, actionable and dependable. Companies need to move past the startup phase to a new phase of accountability. Tools need to integrate into preexisting analytic structures and metrics, to be accessible to customers who are not experts, and to come better supported.

Boudreaux spoke of the need for social media companies to better understand their customers. Instead of marketing tools to their wider base of potential customers, the tools seem to be developed and marketed solely to market researchers. This has led to a more rapid adoption among the market research community and a general skepticism or ambivalence across other industries, who don’t see how using these tools would benefit them.

The companies who truly value and want to expand their customer base will focus on the usability of their dashboards. This is an area ripe for a growing legion of usability experts and usability testing. These dashboards cannot restrict API access and understanding to data scientist experts. They will develop, market and support these dashboards through productive partnerships with their customers, generating measures that are specifically relevant to them and personalized dashboards that fit into preexisting metrics and are easy for the customers to understand and react to in a very practical and personalized sense.

Some companies have already started to work with their customers in more productive ways. Crimson Hexagon, for example, employs people who specialize in using their dashboard. These employees work with customers to better understand and support their use of the platform and run studies of their own using the platform, becoming an internal element in the quality feedback loop.

 

Less Traditional fields for Social Media Analysis:

There was a wide spread of fields represented at the Symposium. I spoke with someone involved in text analysis for legal reasons, including jury analyses. I saw an NYPD name tag. Financial services were well represented. Publishing houses were present. Some health related organizations were present, including neuroscience specialists, medical practitioners interested in predicting early symptoms of diseases like Alzheimer’s, medical specialists interested in helping improve the lives of people with diseases like Autism (e.g. with facial emotion recognition devices), pharmaceutical companies interested in understanding medical literature on a massive scale as well as patient conversation about prescriptions and participation in medical trials. There were traditional market research firms, and many new startups with a wide variety of focuses and functions. There were also established technology companies (e.g. IBM and Dell) with innovation wings and many academic departments. I’m sure I’ve missed many of the entities present or following remotely.

The better research providers can understand the potential breadth of applications  of their research, the more they can improve the specific areas of interest to these communities.

 

Rethinking the Public Image of Sentiment Analysis:

There was some concern that “social” is beginning to have too much baggage to be an attractive label, causing people to think immediately of top platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and belying the true breadth of the industry. This prompted a movement toward other terms at the symposium, including human analytics, humetrics, and measures of human engagement.

 

Accuracy

Accuracy tops out at about 80%, because that’s the limit of inter-rater reliability in sentiment analysis. Understanding the more difficult data is an important challenge for social media analysts. It is important for there to be honesty with customers and with each other about the areas where automated tagging fails. This particular area was a kind of elephant in the room- always present, but rarely mentioned.

Although an 80% accuracy rate is really fantastic compared to no measure at all, and it is an amazing accomplishment given the financial constraints that analysts encounter, it is not an accuracy rate that works across industries and sectors. It is important to consider the “fitness for use” of an analysis. For some industries, an error is not a big deal. If a company is able to respond to 80% of the tweets directed at them in real-time, they are doing quite well, But when real people or weightier consequences are involved, this kind of error rate is blatantly unacceptable. These are the areas where human involvement in the analysis is absolutely critical. Where, honestly speaking, are algorithms performing fantastically, and where are they falling short? In the areas where they fall short, human experts should be deployed, adding behavioral and linguistic insight to the analysis.

One excellent example of Fitness for Use was the presentation by Capital Market Exchange. This company operationalizes sentiment as expert opinion. They mine a variety of sources for expert opinions about investing, and then format the commonalities in an actionable way, leading to a substantial improvement above market performance for their investors. They are able to gain a great deal of market traction that pure sentiment analysts have not by valuing the preexisting knowledge structures in their industry.

 

Targeting the weaknesses

It is important that the field look carefully at areas where algorithms do and do not work. The areas where they don’t represent whole fields of study, many of which have legions of social media analysts at the ready. This includes less traditional areas of linguistics, such as Sociolinguistics, Conversation Analysis (e.g. looking at expected pair parts) and Discourse Analysis (e.g. understanding identity construction), as well as Ethnography (with fast growing subfields, such as Netnography), Psychology and Behavioral Economics. Time to think strategically to better understand the data from new perspectives. Time to more seriously evaluate and invest in neutral responses.

 

Summing Up

Social media data analysis, large scale text analysis and sentiment analysis have enjoyed a kind of honeymoon period. With so many new and fast growing data sources, a plethora of growing needs and applications, and a competitive and fast growing set of analytic strategies, the field has been growing at an astronomical rate. But this excitement has to be balanced out with the practical needs of the marketplace. It is time for growing technologies to better listen to and accommodate the needs of the customer base. This shift will help ensure the viability of the field and free developers up to embrace the spirit of intellectual creativity.

This is an exciting time for a fast growing field!

Thank you to Seth Grimes for organizing such a great event.

 

An Analytical person at the Nutcracker (or Research Methodology, Nutcracker Style)

Last night we attended a Russian Ballet performance of the Nutcracker. It was a great performance, and fun was had by all.

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Early in the performance I realized that although I have developed some understanding of the ballet, I hadn’t shared any of that knowledge with my kids. At this point, I started whispering to them quietly to explain what they were seeing. I whispered quick, helpful comments, such as “those are toys dancing” and “the kids have gone to sleep now, so this is just the adults dancing.” It wasn’t long into the performance that this dynamic began to change. I realized that their insights were much funnier than mine “wow, that guy should go on ‘So You Think You Can Dance!’ or ‘The Voice’ or something! “and that my comments were starting to be pretty off-base. My comments evolved into a mash-up of “The kids have gone to sleep now” “No, I guess the kids haven’t gone to sleep yet” “I really can’t tell if the kids are still up or not!” and “Those are the sugarplum fairies” “Wait, no, maybe these are the sugar plum fairies?” and “I don’t know, sweetie, just watch them dance!” By the end of the show I had no idea what was going on or why the Chuck.E.Cheese king was dancing around on stage (although one of the girls suspected this particular king was actually a bear?). The mom next to me told me she didn’t know what was going on either “and,” she added, “I go to the Nutcracker every year! Maybe that was what made it a Russian Nutcracker?” …And here I thought the Russian influences were the Matryoshka dolls and the Chinese dancers clothed in yellow (despite the awkward English conversation that the costumes prompted).

At the beginning of the show I was nervous to whisper with my kids, but I soon realized that there was a low hum all around me and throughout the concert hall of people whispering with their kids. This, I think, is what remix research methods should be all about- recording and interviewing many audience members to gain a picture of the many perspectives in their interpretations of the show. Here is a challenge question to my readers who are hipper to qualitative research methods: what research strategy could best capture many different interpretations of the same event?

Earlier this week I spoke with a qualitative researcher about the value of an outsider perspective when approaching a qualitative research project. Here is a good example of this dynamic at play: people clapped at various parts of the performance. I recognized that people were clapping at the end of solo or duo performances (like jazz). If I were to describe these dances, I would use the claps as a natural demarcation, but I probably would not think to make any note of the clapping itself. However, the kids in my crew hadn’t encountered clapping during a show before and assumed that clapping marked “something awesome or special.” Being preteens, the kids wanted to prove that they could clap before everyone else, and then revel in the wave of clapping that they seemingly started. At one point this went awry, and the preteens were the only audience members clapping. This awkward moment may have annoyed some of the people around us, but it really made the little sister’s day! From a research perspective, these kids would be more likely to thoroughly document and describe the clapping than I would, which would make for a much more thorough report. Similarly, from a kids-going-to-a-show perspective this was the first story they told to their Dad when they got home- and one that kicked off the rest of our report with uncontrollable laughter and tears.

As the show went on and appeared not to follow any of the recognizable plot points that I had expected (I expected a progressive journey through worlds experienced from the vantage of a sleigh but instead saw all of the worlds dancing together with some unrecognizable kids variously appearing on a sleigh and the main characters sometimes dancing in the mix or on their own), I began to search for other ways to make sense of the spectacle. I thought of a gymnast friend of mine and our dramatically different interpretations of gymnastics events (me: “Wow! Look what she did!” her: “Eh, she scratched the landing. There will be points off for that.” Which parts of the dancing should I be focusing on? I told my little one “Pay attention, so we can try these moves at home.” Barring any understanding of the technical competencies involved (but sure that laying your body at some of these amazing angles, or somehow spinning on one foot, or lifting another person into the air require tons of training, skills and knowledge) or any understanding of the plot as it was unfolding in front of me, I was left simply to marvel at it all. This is why research is an iterative process. In research, we may begin by marveling, but then we observe, note, and observe again. And who knows what amazing insights we will have developed once the process has run its course enough times for events to start making sense!

To be a researcher is not to understand, but rather to have the potential to understand- if you do the research.

More Takeaways from the DC-AAPOR/WSS Summer Conference

Last week I shared my notes from the first two sessions of the DC-AAPOR/ WSS Summer conference preview/review. Here are the rest of the notes, covering the rest of the conference:

Session 3: Accessing and Using Records

  • Side note: Some of us may benefit from a support group format re: matching administrative records
  • AIR experiment with incentives & consent to record linkage: $2 incentive s/t worse than $0. $20 incentive yielded highest response rate and consent rate earlies t in the process, cheaper than phone follow-up
    • If relevant data is available, $20 incentive can be tailored to likely nonrespondents
    • Evaluating race & Hispanic origin questions- this was a big theme over the course of this conference. The social constructiveness of racial/ethnic identity doesn’t map well to survey questions. This Census study found changes in survey answers based on context, location, social position, education, ambiguousness of phenotype, self-perception, question format, census tract, and proxy reports. Also a high number of missing answers.

Session 4: Adaptive Design in Government Surveys

  • A potpourri of quotes from this session that caught my eye:
    • Re: Frauke Kreuter “the mother of all paradata”
      Peter Miller: “Response rates is not the goal”
      Robert Groves: “The way we do things is unsustainable”
    • Response rates are declining, costs are rising
    • Create a dashboard that works for your study. Include the relevant cars you need in order to have a decision maing tool that is tailored/dynamic and data based
      • Include paradata, response data
      • Include info re: mode switching, interventions
      • IMPORTANT: prioritize cases, prioritize modes, shift priorities with experience
      • Subsample open cases (not yet respondes)
      • STOP data collection at a sensible point, before your response bias starts to grow exponentially and before you waste money on expensive interventions that can actually work to make your data less representative
    • Interviewer paradata
      • Chose facts over inference
      • Presence or absence of key features (e.g. ease of access, condition of property)
        • (for a phone survey, these would probably include presence or absence of answer or answering mechanism, etc.)
        • For a household survey, household factors more helpful than neighborhood factors
    • Three kinds of adaptive design
      • Fixed design (ok, this is NOT adaptive)- treat all respondents the same
      • Preplanned adaptive- tailor mailing efforts in advance based on response propensity models
      • Real-time adaptive- adjust mailing efforts in response to real-time response data and evolving response propensities
    • Important aspect of adaptive design: document decisions and evaluate success, re-evaluate future strategy
    • What groups are under-responding and over-responding?
      • Develop propensity models
      • Design modes accordingly
      • Save $ by focusing resources
    • NSCG used adaptive design

Session 5: Public Opinion, Policy & Communication

  • Marital status checklist: categories not mutually exclusive- checkboxes
    • Cain conducted a meta-analysis of federal survey practices
    • Same sex marriage
      • Because of DOMA, federal agencies were not able to use same sex data. Now that it’s been struck down, the question is more important, has funding and policy issues resting on it
      • Exploring measurement:
        • Review of research
        • Focus groups
        • Cognitive interviews
        • Quantitative testing ß current phase
  • Estimates of same sex marriage dramatically inflated by straight people who select gender incorrectly (size/scope/scale)
  • ACS has revised marriage question
  • Instead of mother, father, parent 1, parent 2, …
    • Yields more same sex couples
    • Less nonresponse overall
    • Allow step, adopted, bio, foster, …
    • Plain language
      • Plain Language Act of 2010
      • See handout on plain language for more info
      • Pretty much just good writing practice in general
      • Data visualization makeovers using Tufte guidance
        • Maybe not ideal makeovers, but the data makeover idea is a fun one. I’d like to see a data makeover event of some kind…

Session 7: Questionaire Design and Evaluation

  • Getting your money’s worth! Targeting Resources to Make Cognitice Interviews Most Effective
    • When choosing a sample for cognitive interviews, focus on the people who tend to have the problems you’re investigating. Otherwise, the likelihood of choosing someone with the right problems is quite low
    • AIR experiment: cognitive interviews by phone
      • Need to use more skilled interviewers by phone, because more probing is necessary
      • Awkward silences more awkward without clues to what respondent is doing
      • Hard to evaluate graphics and layout by phone
      • When sharing a screen, interviewer should control mouse (they learned this the hard way)
      • ON the Plus side: more convenient for interviewee and interviewer, interviewers have access to more interviewees, data quality similar, or good enough
      • Try Skype or something?
      • Translation issues (much of the cognitive testing centered around translation issues- I’m not going into detail with them here, because these don’t transfer well from one survey to the next)
        • Education/internationall/translation: They tried to assign equivalent education groups and reflect their equivalences in the question, but when respondents didn’t agree to the equivalences suggested to them they didn’t follow the questions as written

Poster session

  • One poster was laid out like candy land. Very cool, but people stopped by more to make jokes than substantive comments
  • One poster had signals from interviews that the respondent would not cooperate, or 101 signs that your interview will not go smoothly. I could see posting that in an interviewer break room…

Session 8: Identifying and Repairing Measurement and Coverage Errors

  • Health care reform survey: people believe what they believe in spite of the terms and definitions you supply
  • Paraphrased Groves (1989:449) “Although survey language can be standardized, there is no guarantee that interpretation will be the same”
  • Politeness can be a big barrier in interviewer/respondent communication
  • Reduce interviewer rewording
  • Be sure to bring interviewers on board with project goals (this was heavily emphasized on AAPORnet while we were at this conference- the importance of interviewer training, valuing the work of the interviewers, making sure the interviewers feel valued, collecting interviewer feedback and restrategizing during the fielding period and debriefing the interviewers after the fielding period is done)
  • Response format effects when measuring employment: slides requested

Revisiting Latino/a identity using Census data

On April 10, I attended a talk by Jennifer Leeman (Research Sociolinguist @Census and Assistant Professor @George Mason) entitled “Spanish and Latino/a identity in the US Census.” This was a great talk. I’ll include the abstract below, but here are some of her main points:

  • Census categories promote and legitimize certain understandings, particularly because the Census, as a tool of the government, has an appearance of neutrality
  • Census must use categories from OMB
  • The distinction between race and ethnicity is fuzzy and full of history.
    • o   In the past, this category has been measured by surname, mothertongue, birthplace
      o   Treated as hereditary (“perpetual foreigner” status)
      o   Self-id new, before interviewer would judge, record
  • In the interview context, macro & micro meet
    • o   Macro level demographic categories
    • o   Micro:
      • Interactional participant roles
      • Indexed through labels & structure
      • Ascribed vs claimed identities
  • The study: 117 telephone interviews in Spanish
    • o   2 questions, ethnicity & race
    • o   Ethnicity includes Hispano, Latino, Español
      • Intended as synonyms but treated as a choice by respondents
      • Different categories than English (Adaptive design at work!)
  • The interviewers played a big role in the elicitation
    • o   Some interviewers emphasized standardization
      • This method functions differently in different conversational contexts
    • o   Some interviewers provided “teaching moments” or on-the-fly definitions
      • Official discourses mediated through interviewer ideologies
      • Definitions vary
  • Race question also problematic
    • o   Different conceptions of Indioamericana
      • Central, South or North American?
  • Role of language
    • o   Assumption of monolinguality problematic, bilingual and multilingual quite common, partial and mixed language resources
    • o   “White” spoken in English different from “white” spoken in Spanish
    • o   Length of time in country, generation in country belies fluid borders
  • Coding process
    • o   Coding responses such as “American, born here”
    • o   ~40% Latino say “other”
    • o   Other category ~ 90% Hispanic (after recoding)
  • So:
    • o   Likely result: one “check all that apply” question
      • People don’t read help texts
    • o   Inherent belief that there is an ideal question out there with “all the right categories”
      • Leeman is not yet ready to believe this
    • o   The takeaway for survey researchers:
      • Carefully consider what you’re asking, how you’re asking it and what information you’re trying to collect
  • See also Pew Hispanic Center report on Latino/a identity

 

 

 ABSTRACT

Censuses play a crucial role in the institutionalization and circulation of specific constructions of national identity, national belonging, and social difference, and they are a key site for the production and institutionalization of racial discourse (Anderson 1991; Kertzer & Arel 2002; Nobles 2000; Urla 1994).  With the recent growth in the Latina/o population, there has been increased interest in the official construction of the “Hispanic/Latino/Spanish origin” category (e.g., Rodriguez 2000; Rumbaut 2006; Haney López 2005).  However, the role of language in ethnoracial classification has been largely overlooked (Leeman 2004). So too, little attention has been paid to the processes by which the official classifications become public understandings of ethnoracial difference, or to the ways in which immigrants are interpellated into new racial subjectivities.

This presentation addresses these gaps by examining the ideological role of Spanish in the history of US Census Bureau’s classifications of Latina/os as well as in the official construction of the current “Hispanic/Latino/Spanish origin” category. Further, in order to gain a better understanding of the role of the census-taking in the production of new subjectivities, I analyze Spanish-language telephone interviews conducted as part of Census 2010.  Insights from recent sociocultural research on the language and identity (Bucholtz and Hall 2005) inform my analysis of how racial identities are instantiated and negotiated, and how respondents alternatively resist and take up the identities ascribed to them.

* Dr. Leeman is a Department of Spanish & Portuguese Graduate (GSAS 2000).

Still grappling with demographics

Last year I wrote about my changing perspective on demographic variables. My grappling has continued since then.
I think of it as an academic puberty of sorts.

I remember the many crazy thought exercises I subjected myself to as a teenager, as I tried to forge my own set of beliefs and my own place in the world. I questioned everything. At times I was under so much construction that it was a wonder I functioned at all. Thankfully, I survived to enter my twenties intact. But lately I have been caught in a similar thought exercise of sorts, second guessing the use of sociological demographic variables in research.

Two sample projects mark two sides of the argument. One is a potential study of the climate for underrepresented faculty members in physics departments. In our exploration of this subject, the meaning of underrepresented was raised. Indeed there are a number of ways in which a faculty member could be underrepresented or made uncomfortable: gender, race, ethnicity, accent, bodily differences or disabilities, sexual orientation, religion, … At some point, one could ask whether it matters which of these inspired prejudicial or different treatment, or whether the hostile climate is, in and of itself, important to note. Does it make sense to tick off which of a set of possible prejudices are stronger or weaker at a particular department? Or does it matter first that the uncomfortable climate exists, and that personal differences that should be professionally irrelevant are coming into professional play. One could argue that the climate should be the first phase of the study, and any demographics could be secondary. One might be particularly tempted to argue for this arrangement given the small sizes of the departments and hesitation among many faculty members to supply information that could identify them personally.

If that was the only project on my mind, I might be tempted to take a more deconstructionist view of demographic variables altogether. But there is another project that I’m working on that argues against the deconstructionist view- the Global Survey of Physicists.

(Side or backstory: The global survey is kind of a pet project of mine, and it was the project that led me to grad school. Working on it involved coordinating survey design, translation and dissemination with representatives from over 100 countries. This was our first translation project. It began in English and was then translated into 7 additional languages. The translation process took almost a full year and was full of unexpected complications. Near the end of this phase, I attended a talk at the Bureau of Labor Statistics by Yuling Pan from Census. The talk was entitled ‘the Sociolinguistics of Survey Translation.’ I attended it never having heard of Sociolinguistics before. During the course of the talk, Yuling detailed and dissected experiences that paralleled my own into useful pieces and diagnosed and described some of the challenges I had encountered in detail. I was so impressed with her talk that I googled Sociolinguistics as soon as I returned to my office, discovered the MLC a few minutes later. One month later I was visiting Georgetown and working on my application for the MLC. I like to say it was like being swept up off my feet and then engaging in a happy shotgun marriage)

The Global Survey was designed to elicit gender differences in terms of experiences, climate, resources and opportunities, as well as the effects of personal and family constraints and decisions on school and career. The survey worked particularly well, and each dive into the data proves fascinating. This week I delved deeper into the dynamics of one country and saw women’s sources of support erode as they progressed further into school and work, saw the women transition from a virtual parity in school to difficult careers, beginning with their significantly larger chance of having to choose their job because it was the only offer they received, and becoming significantly worse with the introduction of kids. In fact, we found through this survey that kids tend to slow women’s careers and accelerate men’s!

What do these findings say about the use of demographic variables? They certainly validate their usefulness and cause me to wonder whether a lack of focus on demographics would lessen the usefulness of the faculty study. Here I’m reminded that it is important, when discussing demographic variables, to keep in mind that they are not arbitrary. They reflect ways of seeing that are deeply engrained in society. Gender, for example, is the first thing to note about a baby, and it determines a great deal from that point in. Excluding race or ethnicity seems foolish, too, in a society that so deeply engrains these distinctions.

The problem may be in the a priori or unconsidered applications of demographic variables. All too often, the same tired set of variables are dredged up without first considering whether they would even provide a useful distinction or the most useful cuts to a dataset. A recent example of this is the study that garnered some press about racial differences in e-learning. From what I read of the study, all e-learning was collapsed into a single entity, an outcome or dependent variable (as in some kind if measure of success of e-learning), and run by a set of traditional x’s or independent variables, like race and socioeconomic status. In this case, I would have preferred to first see a deeper look into the mechanics of e-learning than a knee jerk rush to the demographic variables. What kind of e-learning course was it? What kinds of interaction were fostered between the students and the teacher, material and other students? So many experiences of e-learning were collapsed together, and differences in course types and learning environments make for more useful and actionable recommendations than demographics ever could.

In the case of the faculty and global surveys as well, one should ask what approaches to the data would yield the most useful analyses. Finding demographic differences leads to what- an awareness of discrimination? Discrimination is deep seeded and not easily cured. It is easy to document and difficult to fix. And yet, more specific information about climate, resources and opportunities could be more useful or actionable. It helps to ask what we can achieve through our research. Are we simply validating or proving known societal differences or are we working to create actionable recommendations? What are the most useful distinctions?

Most likely, if you take the time to carefully consider the information you collect, the usefulness of your analyses and the validity of your hypotheses, you are one step above anyone rotely applying demographic variables out of ill-considered habit. Kudos to you for that!

Janet Harkness- the passing of a great mind in survey research

I just received this announcement from WAPOR. This is sad news. I attended an AAPOR short course that she helped to teach in the Spring of 2010, and she was very sharp, insightful and kind. At the time I was researching multilingual, multinational and multicultural surveys, and her writing was one of my mainstays.

“Janet Harkness died on Memorial Day (May 28, 2012) in Germany at age 63.  Harkness was the Director of the Survey Research and Methodology graduate program and Gallup Research Center, and holder of the Donald and Shirley Clifton Chair in Survey Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  She was the founder and Chair of the Organizing Committee on the International Workshop on Comparative Survey Design and Implementation (CSDI).  Her many contributions to cross-national and cross-cultural survey research included service as Head of the International Social Survey Programme’s Methodology Committee (1997-2008),  board member of the National Science Foundation’s (USA) Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences Advisory Board (2008-present),  board member of the  Deutsches Jugendinstitut (Germany) Advisory Board (2009-present), Co-initiator of the Cross-Cultural Survey Guidelines Initiative, Chair of the Organizing Committee for the International Conference on Survey Methods in Multicultural, Multinational and Multiregional Contexts (3MC, Berlin 2008), and member of the European Social Survey’s (ESS) Central Coordinating Team. The ESS was awarded the European Union’s top annual science award, the Descartes Prize, in 2005.  She has been a member of WAPOR since 2009.

Besides her substantial contributions and organizational achievements in cross-national survey research, Harkness made major contributions to the scholarly literature including Cross-Cultural Survey Equivalence (1998), Cross-Cultural Survey Methods (with F.J.R. Van de Vijver and P. Ph. Mohler, 2003), and Survey Methods in Multicultural, Multinational, and Multiregional Contexts (with M. Braun, B. Edwards, T.P. Johnson, L.F Lyberg, P. PH. Mohler, B. Pennell and T.W. Smith, 2010).

As her professional colleague, Don Dillman, Regents Professor at Washington State Unversity, noted of Janet “I don’t know of anyone who has done as much thinking as she has about cross-cultural surveys, and how measurement differs across languages and countries…That’s one of the major challenges we now face in doing surveys as we increasingly shift to a world-wide emphasis in survey design.”

She is survived by her husband Peter Ph. Mohler.”

——-

10/15/12 Edited to add some great news:

Announcement for the Janet A. Harkness Student Paper Award

The Janet A. Harkness Student Paper Award will be issued annually, starting in 2013, by the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) and the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) to honor the memory of Dr. Harkness and the inspiration she brought to her students and colleagues.

In particular, WAPOR and AAPOR will consider papers related to the study of multi-national/ multi-cultural/multi-lingual survey research (aka 3M survey research), or to the theory and methods of 3M survey research, including statistics and statistical techniques used in such research. Paper topics might include: (a) methodological issues in 3M surveys; (b) public opinion in 3M settings; (c) theoretical issues in the formation, quality, or change in 3M public opinion; (d) or substantive findings about 3M public opinion. The competition committee encourages submissions that deal with the topics of the annual conferences, for which the call for papers are posted on both associations’ websites in the fall.

Submissions to the Harkness award competition are anticipated to be 15-25 pages in length. A prize of $750 will be awarded to the winning paper and the author(s) of the paper will be invited to deliver it as a part of either the annual WAPOR conference, AAPOR conference, or in certain years the WAPOR-AAPOR joint conference.

For a winning paper with one author, WAPOR and AAPOR will pay for the author’s travel expenses to and from the nearest WAPOR or AAPOR annual conference for that year. However, for a winning submission with multiple authors, WAPOR and AAPOR will pay only for the primary author (or his/her designee, who must be a co-author) to present the paper. Up to two other papers each year may receive an Honorable Mention designation with each receiving a $100 cash prize (though no travel expenses).

All authors must be current students (graduate or undergraduate) at the time of the submission, or must have received their degree during the preceding calendar year. The research must have been substantially completed while the author was (all authors were) enrolled in a degree program. Preference will be given to papers based on research not presented elsewhere.

A panel of public opinion researchers from WAPOR and AAPOR’s membership – drawn from academic, government, and commercial sectors – will judge the papers.

The 2013 Call-for-Submission of papers for the Harkness Award will be issued in the near future.

Language as a way of seeing

A conversation in my Intercultural Communication class on Tuesday inspired me to think about language in a different way.

There is a fantastic paper by Charles Goodwin called Professional Vision that shows how people train each other into ways of seeing. The example he uses is an anthropological investigation of soil, and he shows how the new anthropologist is trained by the more experienced anthropologist to notice and describe gradations in the color or quality of the soil. These gradations have a specific meaning within their investigation, and being able to describe them is an important tool of the study.

Language provides two important functions that I want to focus on today. The one we think of most often is the tool function. Language gives us a way to communicate what we see. But it is much less often that we think about language as a way of seeing.

I’ve talked about our constant stimulation before on this blog. We are constantly exposed to more sensory data than we could ever process. Language provides a lens through which to see the world in front of us. Languages have inherent sets of coding structures to apply to the world.

There is another function of language that corpus and computational linguistics really highlights, and that’s habituation. We may have the tools within a language to describe something in any number of ways, but very few of these ways are actually used with any frequency. We learn in corpus linguistics that language is never random. In many ways, in fact, language follows a zipfian distribution, with a high concentration of high frequency words or expressions, and each after the most frequent exponentially less frequent.The language itself may be large, but the language we use is much smaller.

This is an important element to consider in the conceptualization of translation. One person who reviewed the original Russian translation of our Global Survey of Physicists complained that if they did not know English, they would not have understood the Russian. The more I learn about language, the more I understand how that could be possible. Language is not just grammatical, it is habitual, and it holds a way of seeing the world.