DIAGNOSTICS FOR REDESIGNING SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRES: MEASURING WORK IN THE CURRENT POPULATION SURVEY

Between 1986 and 1993, a program of questionnaire design andcognitive research was conducted by the Census Bureau and Bureauof Labor Statistics, to improve labor force measurements inthe Current Population Survey (CPS). As part of the researchprogram, diagnostic measures for systematically testing andevaluating alternative questionnaire versions were developedand applied. This article reports results of applying two methods,special follow-up probes and hypothetical vignettes, to themeasurement of "work" in the CPS. These measures provided bothdirect and indirect information about problems of respondentcomprehension and reporting errors. In this article, we analyzeresults using these diagnostic measures to evaluate the effectof questionnaire revisions on reporting of work activities,and we assess the consistency and usefulness of the informationprovided by alternative diagnostic measures for pretesting andselecting questions.     

Tours of Duty, Cross-Identification and Introjection: The Colonial Administrative Mind in Wartime Indochina

Abstract  Some scholars have explained colonial policies as the outgrowth of the need to provide profits and prestige for the motherland. Others have linked policymaking to the use of colonial space as experimental laboratories of modernity; while others assert that the overseas was a terrain for finding solutions to some of the political, social and aesthetic problems which were affecting France at the time. In contrast, this paper traces how colonial policies can be explained at the level of individual colonial administrators. It does so not only by reference to the social backgrounds of officials, but also their inner "psychic processes." This study addresses the colonial tendency to imagine cross-identification between France and the colony. It presents three case studies of colonial officials in Indochina to investigate how administrators' perceptions of France became projected onto the colonies, and how one of them incorporated within himself some of the attributes of the colonized, an example of introjection. It is argued that these processes had an impact on policymaking. My theoretical goal with this piece was to apply a psychoanalytic approach to the study of the empire.     

Wittgenstein,Durkheim, Garfinkel and Winch: Constitutive Orders of Sensemaking

This paper proposes an approach to the question of meaning and understanding based on the idea of constitutive rules and their relationship to the social objects they are used to create. This approach implicates mutual attention as an essential aspect of the social processes constitutive of social objects and mutual intelligibility. Social objects as such include the meaning, perception and coherence of things, identities and talk, etc. There is a relatively unexplored but important line of argument in sociology that has, from the beginning, explained the coherence and mutual intelligibility of social objects and associations in terms of constitutive practices and social facts. This line of argument begins with Emile Durkheim (1893) and carries through the work of Harold Garfinkel to current studies of work and interaction, human computer interaction and talk. The argument is that we use constitutive practices (Constitutive rules or constitutive background expectancies) to create social objects and make coherent and shared meanings. To act is in this sense for Garfinkel ([1948]2006) to “mean”. Explaining the consistency of social objects and orders in terms of constitutive orders, rules, or practices is an approach that meets the challenges posed to social science and philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953 ), Peter Winch (1958 ) and Paul Grice (1989 ).     

MARKET POWER IN ORAL DOUBLE AUCTIONS

This paper reports the results of a series of oral-double-auction experiments in which some traders possess market power. A market is set up in which the configuration of the supply and demand curves leads to an asymmetry between buyers and sellers in their abilities to influence transactions prices. This market structure does not always lead to convergence to the competitive equilibrium price despite the competitive nature of the oral-double-auction institution. The nonconvergence occurs most frequently in the experiments involving experienced subjects.