Chapter VII. Nonsampling bias and variance in the SRC Telephone Survey data

This small exercise was a check on the nature of the effects of the experimental interviewing behaviors, one that attempted to dismiss the possibility that the increases in reporting were coming at the expense of greater interviewer variance. The findings presented are limited by the small number of statistics examined, but they suggest that the possibility that the experimental behaviors merely move errors from bias terms to variance terms is unlikely to be experienced. It is also unlikely that the experimental effects do not uniformly decrease interviewer variance and they appear to be reducing response bias. The measurement of the net effect of the treatments on mean square error requires estimates of the relative size of total response variance composed both of interviewer and respondent variability and response bias associated with the experimental procedures.