A Preliminary Assessment of Cultural Variability in Respondent Actions

• Activity Number: 567
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 4, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Timothy Patrick Johnson*+ and Young Ik Cho and Allyson Holbrook
• Companies: Survey Research Laboratory and Survey Research Laboratory and Survey Research Laboratory
• Keywords: behavior coding ; cross-cultural ; measurement

Abstract

Behavior codes can provide valuable auxiliary information with which to evaluate the survey-related behavior of both respondents and interviewers. They have been recently also employed to investigate cultural variability in both interpreting and answering survey questions. A potential limitation of the use of behavior coding, however, for making cross-cultural comparisons is that the behaviors they capture may themselves be culturally conditioned, making their utility as objective, etic indicators of social behavior less tenable. We investigate this possibility by evaluating the frequency with which a set of individual behavior codes are exhibited by respondents from four race/ethnic groups who participated in a health-related survey. Individual behavior code ratios (and 95% CIs) between pairs of race/ethnic groups will also be compared. Our discussion will focus on the conclusions