From Never Go Back: He said, “No one is here to work with you, boy. We’re here to kick your butt and take our car and our money back.” “OK,” Reacher said. “We can go down that road, if you like. But there’s no reason why all of you should go to the hospital. You ever heard of Gallup?” “Who?” “It’s a polling organization. Like at election time. They tell you this guy is going to get fifty-one...
Have we reached peak NSSE?
More trend data from their annual reports: There is a clear decline in the past five years. While some of this is probably due to institutions using the NSSE on a less than annual basis, I think there is a real decline here (the fact that schools may be using it less frequently is also an indicator of how useful they are finding it). My prediction is that this decline will continue as...
College student survey response rates continue to decline
Depressingly, average institutional response rates for the NSSE have dropped over 10 percentage points during the last decade, to 30% in their most recent annual report. While the content of the NSSE leaves much to be desired, their response rates are a good indicator of what is happening across the country on college campuses. Some of this decline is probably due to survey fatigue; some may be...
Matching and complex survey data
Several people have asked me about using propensity score matching with complex surveys, and whether/how weights, PSUs and strata should be taken into account. This paper explains how to handle these issues.
Why use survey weights?
I just came across an old paper by Kish that does a nice job describing some of the basic issues around survey weights:
WEIGHTING: WHY, WHEN, AND HOW?