IFiS: Seminar "Mitigating the Risk of Nonresponse and Measurement Errors in Political Science Surveys by Accounting for Respondents’ Political Interes"

We would like to invite you to a new series of seminars organized by the Department of Computational Social Sciences (head: Prof. Artur Pokropek).
PAN-Metrics seminars cover the topics of methodology and measurement in the broadly defined social sciences.

The next meeting will be held online on Monday, June 16th at 4:00 p.m. (16:00) CET.

The speaker will be Saskia Bartholomäus (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim, Germany), who will give a talk entitled:
Mitigating the Risk of Nonresponse and Measurement Errors in Political Science Surveys by Accounting for Respondents’ Political Interest.

Abstract:
Political science surveys are subject to biased estimates of political attitudes and behavior due to measurement and nonresponse errors. These errors are especially pronounced among politically disengaged individuals, who are less likely to participate and more likely to give low-effort answers when they do. Improving respondents’ survey experience by offering a more interesting and varied questionnaire poses a possible solution to this problem. My research breaks ground by investigating whether including non-political survey content improves the survey experience of politically disengaged respondents and enhances data quality with respect to measurement and nonresponse errors in political science surveys. To this end, I conducted two survey experiments in probability- and nonprobability-based panels that varied the content of political science questionnaires. The results provide first evidence that offering a varied questionnaire rather than a purely political one lowers or even diminishes the gap in measurement and nonresponse errors between politically engaged and disengaged respondents. These findings open new directions for improving political science surveys by rethinking questionnaire design to address common sources of error. I conclude by outlining future research opportunities in this area.

Keywords: survey experience, topic interest, survey content, data quality, nonresponse bias, political engagement

Bio:
Saskia Bartholomäus studied Political Science at the University of Hamburg and Empirical Democracy Studies at the University of Mainz before joining the department Data and Research on Society at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences as a doctoral researcher. Her current research focuses on data quality in social and political science surveys. In her dissertation, she investigates the nonresponse bias of non-voters in political science surveys, the resulting limitation of substantive research, and approaches to resolve the issue. Recently, Saskia was invited to present her research at the Thought Summit on The Future of Survey Science at Cornell University.

Website: https://www.gesis.org/institut/ueber-uns/mitarbeitendenverzeichnis/person/Saskia.Bartholomaeus
LinkedIn: www.linkedin com/in/saskiabartholomaeus
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/saskiabrthlms.bsky.social

The meeting is scheduled for around one hour.

Please contact us to receive the Zoom link (marek.muszynski@ifispan.edu.pl).