This month's Why Social Science? post comes from Dr. Kristen Olson from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln about how asking the right questions and using surveys will help us better understand and support populations we want to study.
Data are everywhere. Data are collected as we browse the internet, purchase items from stores, pay our taxes, go to the doctor’s office, enroll our children in school, and travel using a car or public transportation. But this outwardly observable information reflects only a small fraction of what humans do in a day, largely fails to reflect what we think and feel about our lives, surroundings, and futures, and does not capture why we think, feel, or do these activities. What is a researcher or policy maker to do when they need information that cannot be observed through records of people’s behavior? Long before digital traces of our lives were created to track everyday interactions, social, behavioral, and economic scientists used surveys to ask people about activities, opinions, and knowledge not easily found in records.
Survey questions can capture information about a population that cannot be known in any other way. Surveys conducted by the federal statistical system allow insights into whether someone is currently looking for work, but not employed, uses a doctor’s office versus urgent care clinic for health care, and even information about who lives in a household. Administrative data systems can be useful for understanding the quality of survey data, as some information is more reliable when found in records than survey reports. But survey data also provide insights into the quality of administrative data systems. For instance, while some might look to crime statistics based on police reports, less than half of violent crimes are reported to the police and police reporting varies dramatically across types of crimes and background characteristics of people. This information cannot be obtained from police records alone; we can only get it by asking people both about their victimization experiences and their reporting behavior. Even those who call for replacing or augmenting survey data, with administrative or commercial records or digital traces, typically require high-quality probability-based surveys for statistical adjustments. Probability-based surveys also are the benchmarks for evaluating the quality of estimates from administrative, commercial, and digital data.