Homogenizing Responses to Different Survey Questions on the Same Topic: Proposal of a Scale Homogenization Method Using a Reference Distribution

Survey data are often used for comparison purposes, such as comparisons across nations or comparisons over time. To be effective, this would require equivalent questions and equivalent responses options to the questions. Yet there is a lot of variation in the response scales used, which, for example, differ in the number of response options used and the labeling of these options. This is the case in happiness research, and as a result most of the research data in this field is incomparable. Several methods have been proposed to transform ratings on verbal response scales to a common numerical scale, typically ranging from 0 to 10. In this paper we give an overview of the progress made in those Scale Homogenization methods over time. We describe two early methods: Linear Stretch and the Semantic Judgement of Fixed Word Value Method. Next we discuss the Semantic Judgement of Word Value in Context Method in more detail. Based on these discussions we propose a new Reference Distribution Method. We apply the Semantic Judgement of Word Value in Context and the Reference Distribution Methods to data on happiness in The Netherlands for the years 1989–2009. We show that the Reference Distribution Method produces comparable time series on different questions and that it allows discontinuities in data to be corrected.     

What Makes Koreans Happy?: Exploration on the Structure of Happy Life among Korean Adults

The current study explored the perceptions of Korean people about what can make them happy and constructed a comprehensive measurement of happiness of Korean. A total of 61 Korean adults participated in Focused Group Interview (FGI), where they were asked three questions (e.g., What makes you happy? What could make you happier than now? In general, who is a happy person?). Participants’ responses were reviewed by the present investigators independently and 152 statements of happy life with 18 categories were derived from content-analysis. The list of 152 statements of happy life was administered to 517 Korean adults to assess the importance of each item for Koreans’ happy life through the objective rating scale (6-point Likert scale). Confirmatory factor analysis showed that most factors were unidimensional. The items with low reliability were deleted and some new items were added, resulting in the experimental form of the Happy Life Inventory with 156 items and 18 categories including a new category of religion. The preliminary form of the Happy Life Inventory and the Psychological Well-being scale were administered to a nationwide sample of 1503 Korean adults in order to assess their happiness through 6-point Likert scale. The responses from 877 participants were submitted to exploratory factor analysis. The items with low factor loadings were excluded and 98 items with 16 factors were included in the final version of the Happy Life Inventory. Confirmatory factor analysis of the responses from 611 subjects confirmed that the 16 factor model was appropriate and most categories had one underlying dimension with moderate to high reliabilities. Correlations between the Happy Life Inventory and the psychological well-being scale supported construct validity of the Happy Life Inventory. Suggestions for further research were discussed.     

The Measurement of Ethnic and Religious Divisions: Spatial,Temporal, and Categorical Dimensions with Evidence from Mindanao,the Philippines

Survey research on subjective wellbeing in The Netherlands started in the early 1970s. The time series happiness and life satisfaction that have emerged since then are unfortunately based on slightly different survey items of which one part uses verbal response scales and another part uses numerical response scales. The diversity of the survey items and a number of other measurement issues, such as the effects of changes in survey mode, hamper comparison over time and make it difficult to establish whether life became any better over the last forty years. These problems can be tackled using the recently developed Reference Distribution Method with which responses to equivalent but not identical survey questions can be pooled to obtain long, consistent time series. We applied the Reference Distribution method to pool time series of happiness and life satisfaction. We conclude that in the past 40 years the Dutch have become slightly happier and satisfied with their lives.     

Designing response scales with multi-trait-multi-method experiments

ABSTRACT

Split-ballot multi-trait-multi-method experiments are used to evaluate the quality of measurement of different response scales of survey items gauging “evaluation of government services” and “political trust.” The response scales differ by agree/disagree scales, item-specific scales, total number of categories, and the presence of fixed reference points on their constructing extreme items. The Center for Opinion Studies of the Catalan government in Spain conducted the survey in 2011. The best response scale depends on the complexity of the topic and of the formulation of the question. For simple topics and formulations, the format of the response scale has no effect on the quality of measurement.     

Computer Models of Social Processes: The Case of Migration

The demographic model is a program for representing births, deaths, migration, and social mobility as social processes in a non-stationary stochastic process (Markovian). Transition probabilities for each age group are stored and then retrieved at the next appearance of that age cohort. In this way new transition probabilities can be calculated as a function of the old transition probabilities and of two successive distribution vectors.Transition probabilities can be calculated to represent effects of the whole age-by-state distribution at any given time period, too. Such effects as saturation or queuing may be represented by a market mechanism; for example, migration between metropolitan areas can be represented as depending upon job supplies and labor markets. Within metropolitan areas, migration can be represented as invasion and succession processes with tipping points (acceleration curves), and the market device has been extended to represent this phenomenon.Thus, the demographic model makes possible the representation of alternative classes of models of demographic processes. With each class of model one can deduce implied time series (varying parame-terswithin the class) and the output of the several classes can be compared to each other and to outside criteria, such as empirical time series.     

Research on Feasible Transition of Age Structure in China

With comparison of demographic changes between the developed European countries and China,this paper has discussed the shortcomings of the Western demographic transition theories.Furthermore,the paper has proposed the direction of demographic transition and the criteria of such transition’s completion.With the establishment of age-structure transition theory,and helped with strict definitions of both surplus population and appropriate population,the paper points out the distinction of demographic age-structure between those developing countries that are undergoing demographic transition and those developed countries with a near completion of such demographic transition.Finally it concludes that China’s transition of age structure is moving towards a feasible direction.     

中国人口年龄结构合理转化问题研究

文章将欧洲发达国家与中国历经的人口实践进行比较,探讨西方人口转变理论的不足,进而提出人口转变的方向及完成与否的判别标准。文章在构建年龄结构转化理论的基础上,严格区分了相对过剩人口与相对适宜人口,指出未完成年龄结构转化过程的发展中国家与相对基本完成年龄结构转化过程的发达国家人口状况的区别,从而论证中国人口年龄结构转化的日趋合理性。     

Sliders,visual analogue scales,or buttons: Influence of formats and scales in mobile and desktop surveys

ABSTRACT

In an experiment dealing with the use of personal computer, tablet, or mobile, scale points (up to 5, 7, or 11) and response formats (bars or buttons) are varied to examine differences in mean scores and nonresponse. The total number of “not applicable” answers does not vary significantly. Personal computer has the lowest item nonresponse, followed by mobile and tablet, and a lower mean score than for mobile. Slider bars showed lower mean scores and more nonresponses than buttons, indicating that they are more prone to bias and difficult in use. Sider bars, which work with a drag-and-drop principle, perform worse than visual analogue scales working with a point-and-click principle and buttons. Five-point scales have more nonresponses than eleven-point scales. Respondents evaluate 11-point scales more positively than shorter scales.     

Greater Happiness for a Greater Number: Did the Promise of Enlightenment Come True?

In the eighteenth century ‘Enlightened’ thinkers challenged the belief that happiness exists only in Heaven. They claimed that happiness is possible in earthly life and foresaw that greater happiness would be achieved using reason. Did this promise of greater happiness come true? Several scholars doubt that we have become any happier and some claim that happiness has declined. These critical claims are tested using the time trend data available in the World Database of Happiness, which cover the period 1950–2010 and involve 1531 data points in 67 nations yielding 199 time-series ranging for 10 to more than 40 years. The analysis reveals that happiness has risen in most nations. The average yearly rise in the 67 nations was +0.012 on scale 0–10, which equals a rise of one full point every 83 years. At this rate happiness must have improved by more than two points over the past two centuries and, together with increasing longevity, this denotes an unprecedented rise in happy life years.     

Midwifery students’ conceptions of worst imaginable pain

BackgroundThe Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) is one of the most widely used pain assessment scales in clinical practice and research. However, the VAS is used less frequently in midwifery than in other clinical contexts. The issue of how people interpret the meaning of the VAS endpoints (i.e. no pain and worst imaginable pain) has been discussed. The aim of this study was to explore midwifery students’ conceptions of ‘worst imaginable pain’.MethodsA sample of 230 midwifery students at seven universities in Sweden responded to an open-ended question: ‘What is the worst imaginable pain for you?’ This open-ended question is a part of a larger study. Their responses underwent manifest content analysis.ResultsAnalysis of the midwifery students’ responses to the open-ended question revealed five categories with 24 sub-categories. The categories were Overwhelming pain, Condition-related pain, Accidents, Inflicted pain and Psychological suffering.ConclusionsThe midwifery students’ conceptions of ‘worst imaginable pain’ are complex, elusive and diverse.     

Links Between Demographic and Kinship Transitions

The demographic transition is also a kinship transition. This insight is obvious for certain types of kin—as fertility falls, parents have fewer children, for instance—but its broader implications for communities remain unexplored. Prior work on this topic has focused on how the demographic transition reshapes the availability of living kin within a society over time to the neglect of how differences in the demographic transition lead to differences in kinship networks between communities. In this article, I examine survey data (for rural Thailand) and use microsimulation methods to test how different pathways through the demographic transition affect kinship networks in communities. My results show that different routes through the demographic transition can substantially alter kinship network size and, entirely through the mechanism of demographic change, have indirect effects on community integration. These effects persist long after the demographic transition has ended. I theorize reasons that community‐level differentiation in kinship networks owing to the demographic transition are an important mechanism linking the demographic transition to modernity.     

Measures of self-reported well-being: their affective,cognitive, and other components

This investigation begins from the hypothesis that social indicators of perceived well-being — e.g., people's assessment of their own life quality — will, like other attudes, reflect two basic types of influences: affect and cognition. In addition, the indicators were expected to include two other components: unique variance (mainly random measurement error) and correlated measurement error. These ideas are investigated using a structural modeling approach applied to 23 assessments of life-as-a-whole from a national survey of Americans (N=1072) and/or a survey of urban residents in England (N=932). In both sets of data, models that included affective and cognitive factors fit significantly better than more restricted models. Furthermore, as expected, measures of (a) ‘happiness’, ‘fun’, and ‘enjoyment’ tended to be relatively more loaded with affect than were measures of (b) ‘satisfaction’, ‘success’, and ‘meeting needs’; and (c) measures designed to tap both affect and cognition tended to fall between the first two groups. In addition, the results suggest that measures employing relatively many scale points and direct assessments yield more valid indicators of people's evaluations of life-as-a-whole than do measures based on three-point scales or on explicit comparisons with other times or groups. These results contribute to basic knowledge about the nature of life quality assessments, help to explain some previously puzzling relationships with demographic factors such as age and education, and may be useful to designers of future studies of perceived well-being.     

Medicaid Expansions and Fertility in the United States

Beginning in the mid-1980s and extending through the early to mid-1990s, a substantial number of women and children in the United States gained eligibility for Medicaid through a series of income-based expansions. Using natality data from the National Center for Health Statistics, we estimate fertility responses to these eligibility expansions. We follow Currie and Gruber (2001) and measure changes in state Medicaid-eligibility policy by simulating the fraction of a standard population that would qualify for benefits in different states and different time periods. From 1985 to 1996, the fraction of women aged 15–44 who were eligible for Medicaid coverage for a pregnancy increased more than 20 percentage points. When we use a state and year fixed-effects model with a limited set of covariates, our estimates indicate that fertility increases in response to Medicaid expansions. However, after we include fixed effects for demographic characteristics, the estimated relationship diminishes substantially in size and is no longer statistically significant. We conclude that there is no robust relationship between Medicaid expansions and fertility.     

Labor force composition and underemployment trends, 1969–1980

Underemployment indicators are both ‘objective’ indicators of individual well-being and social welfare and ‘normative’ indicators for programmatic use. Components of an underemployment indicator framework, the Labor Utilization Framework (LUF), are operationally defined and shown to be closely related to a family of proposed alternatives. Using CPS data, a 12-year time series of LUF indicators is developed for the U.S. labor force and its key subgroups. The across-time heterogeneity of the labor force is analyzed in relation to a ‘basic’ demographic group-by-LUF-by-time contingency, showing how the complexity of labor force structure that emerges from a multi-state indicator of underemployment can be rigorously modeled. Standard loglinear models, which focus on the temporal aspects of data from repeated cross-sectional surveys, provide the analytic technique. Changes in the demographic composition of the labor force account for about 30% of the overall period variability, and age structure has made the most important contribution to the compositional change.     

现代化进程中的人口转变:一个广义视野的考察

本文首先描述了西方学者对人口转变过程、阶段的描述和微观、宏观层面原因的解释,在此基础上评价了国内学者对中国人口转变的论争,最后从广义的视野讨论了传统社会现代化进程中的结构转型、制度变迁与人口转变的关系。     

Political demography: Powerful trends under-attended by demographic science

The interconnections between politics and the dramatic demographic changes under way around the world have been neglected by the two research disciplines that could contribute most to their understanding: demography and political science. Instead, this area of ‘political demography’ has largely been ceded to political activists, pundits, and journalists, leading often to exaggerated or garbled interpretation. The terrain includes some of the most politically sensitive and contested issues: alleged demographically determined shifts in the international balance of power; low fertility, population decline, and demographic ageing; international migration; change in national identity; and compositional shifts in politically sensitive social categories and human rights. Meanwhile many governments and non-governmental actors have actively pursued varieties of ‘strategic demography’, deploying fertility, mortality, or migration as instruments of domestic or international policy. Political scientists and demographers could and should use their knowledge and analytic techniques to improve understanding and to moderate excessive claims and fears on these topics.     

The demography of words: The global decline in non-numeric fertility preferences, 1993–2011

This paper examines the decline in non-numeric responses to questions about fertility preferences among women in the developing world. These types of response—such as ‘don’t know’ or ‘it’s up to God’—have often been interpreted through the lens of fertility transition theory as an indication that reproduction has not yet entered women’s ‘calculus of conscious choice’. However, this has yet to be investigated cross-nationally and over time. Using 19?years of data from 32 countries, we find that non-numeric fertility preferences decline most substantially in the early stages of a country’s fertility transition. Using country-specific and multilevel models, we explore the individual- and contextual-level characteristics associated with women’s likelihood of providing a non-numeric response to questions about their fertility preferences. Non-numeric fertility preferences are influenced by a host of social factors, with educational attainment and knowledge of contraception being the most robust and consistent predictors.     

西部人口转变探析

利用1969-1998全国分省人口的统计资料,描述了西部人口转变的过程,比较了西部与东部和全国人口转变的差异,以及西部内部人口转变的差异,总结出西部人口转变的三个特点,指出西部人口转变的彻底完成还有待于西部地区的全面发展。     

中国人口转变与消费制度变迁

从抑制消费到刺激消费是中国消费制度的重大变革。本文运用新制度经济学和人口经济学理论,论证了中国人口转变通过人口增长的迅速下降,人口年龄结构的变化及其带来的人口红利对消费制度变迁的影响:死亡率下降主导的初期阶段,人口转变固化了抑制消费的制度,出生率下降主导阶段,人口转变与改革开放条件下的高速经济增长相叠加加剧了原有消费制度的不均衡。通过实证分析,揭示出消费率在人口转变过程中下降的必然性和中国保持适度人口增长的必要。