Panel Conditioning in the General Social Survey

Andrew Halpern-Manners, John Robert Warren and Florencia Torche

Sociological Methods & Research, 2017, vol. 46, issue 1, 103-124

Abstract: Does participation in one wave of a survey have an effect on respondents’ answers to questions in subsequent waves? In this article, we investigate the presence and magnitude of “panel conditioning†effects in one of the most frequently used data sets in the social sciences: the General Social Survey (GSS). Using longitudinal records from the 2006, 2008, and 2010 surveys, we find convincing evidence that at least some GSS items suffer from this form of bias. To rule out the possibility of contamination due to selective attrition and/or unobserved heterogeneity, we strategically exploit a series of between-person comparisons across time-in-survey groups. This methodology, which can be implemented whenever researchers have access to at least three waves of rotating panel data, is described in some detail so as to facilitate future applications in data sets with similar design elements.

Keywords: panel conditioning; longitudinal surveys; time-in-survey effects; General Social Survey; panel data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0049124114532445 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:somere:v:46:y:2017:i:1:p:103-124

DOI: 10.1177/0049124114532445

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Methods & Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().