Workshop Title:
To Vignettes and Beyond: How to Adjust Subjective Quality-of-Life Measures for Differences in Scale Use
Instructors: Dr. Kristen Cooper
Date and Time: Monday 21 July, 1:00pm-4:00pm
Location: University of Luxembourg (room TBA)
Fee:
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$35 USD (ISQOLS Members)/$20 USD (Student, Retired, Developing Country ISQOLS Members);
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$50 USD (Non-ISQOLS members)/$35 USD (Student, Retired, Developing Country non-ISQOLS Members)
Workshop Description:
This workshop offers quality-of-life researchers practical guidance on dealing with interpersonal differences in use of the response scale – “scale use” – when analyzing or collecting self-reported well-being (SWB) survey data. The workshop focuses on a new method of the instructor and her coauthors, Benjamin et al. (2023), which uses calibration questions for scale-use adjustment. This method builds on the pioneering “anchoring vignette” approach (Kapteyn, Smith, and van Soest (2007, 2009); King, Murray, Salomon, and Tandon (2004)), with some alternative assumptions.
Brief outline of topics to be covered:
· Overview of the vignette approach, in which respondents rate the SWB of hypothetical individuals described in vignettes, and researchers use these ratings to map respondents’ ratings of their own SWB onto a common scale.
· Calibration questions (CQs): survey questions for which the state being rated is constant across individuals (including, but not limited to, vignettes). Discussion of how to design calibration questions when new SWB data are being collected.
· Translation function: a mapping of one individual’s scale use to another’s. Based on empirical evidence that translation functions are roughly linear, and in a departure from the vignette literature, the Benjamin et al. method assumes that an individual’s scale use can be characterized by two parameters: an intercept-like “shifter” term and a slope-like “stretcher” term.
· Discussion of the evidence for and implications of three different possibilities: general scale use (scale use is the same for all survey questions), specific scale use (scale use differs by dimension, such as life satisfaction vs. happiness), and categorical scale use (scale use is the same for a set of similar dimensions).
· A high-level overview of the statistical models used for scale-use correction and the statistical tools – including R code – for using the CQ data to “correct” for scale use differences.
· Example of scale-use correction in an important application: estimating the covariance of individual SWB with a demographic variable (for example, to study the effect of age on happiness).
Activities and Duration:
This is an in-person workshop which is three hours long (including breaks). It incorporates various pedagogical methodologies, including lectures, interactive discussions, and (optionally) hands-on practice using R or other software for scale-use correction.
Reading Material:
This workshop is based on various research articles, with a primary focus on the following:
· Benjamin, Daniel J., Kristen Cooper, Ori Heffetz, Miles S. Kimball, and Jiannan Zhou. 2023. “Adjusting for Scale-Use Heterogeneity in Self-Reported Well-Being.” National Bureau of Economic Research, w31728.
· Kapteyn, Arie, James P. Smith, and Arthur van Soest. 2007. “Vignettes and Self-Reports of Work Disability in the U.S. and the Netherlands.” American Economic Review 97 (1): 461–473.
· Kapteyn, Arie, James P. Smith, and Arthur van Soest. 2010. “Life Satisfaction.” In International Differences in Well-Being: 70-104. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
· King, Gary, Christopher J.L. Murray, Joshua A. Salomon, and Ajay Tandon. 2004. “Enhancing the Validity and Cross-Cultural Comparability of Measurement in Survey Research.” The American Political Science Review 98 (1): 191–207.
Workshop Instructor:
Dr. Kristen Cooper is an economist by training, a long-time researcher of well-being-related topics, and a recent member of ISQOLS. She is currently an Associate Professor of Economics at Gordon College, a liberal arts college in the Boston area where she also completed her undergraduate studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. Together with co-authors Daniel J. Benjamin (UCLA), Ori Heffetz (HUJI, Cornell), and Miles S. Kimball (Univ. of Colorado), and others, she has been Co-Investigator on two NIH grants to develop methods for measuring well-being and its determinants over the life course. With these co-authors and others, she has contributed to many conferences and published related journal articles. Kristen specializes in interdisciplinary conferences and international settings. In 2019, she was a Fulbright U.S. Senior Scholar at the Universidad de La Laguna in Tenerife, Spain. Kristen looks forward to engaging with ISQOLS members and guests at this workshop, as we discuss methods to potentially improve the interpersonal comparability of self-reported quality-of-life measures.
