252 – Retention, Attrition, and Respondent Burden
Panel Conditioning: Change in True Value vs. Change in Self-Report
Stephanie Eckman
Institute for Employment Research
Frauke Kreuter
Joint Program in Survey Methodology
Ting Yan
University of Michigan
Panel conditioning is an important source of measurement error unique to panel surveys. It refers to the phenomenon where participation in repeated interviews changes respondents' true behaviour, attitudes, or knowledge, or their reporting of their true behaviour, attitudes, and knowledge. A major weakness of (and a challenge to) the existing research on panel conditioning is its inability to distinguish between true change and change in reporting behavior. Existing studies are heavily reliant on assumptions and models when studying panel conditioning because they have no external gold-standard data source. This paper examines panel conditioning effects using data from four waves of a large German panel survey on labour market outcomes (PASS). Because administrative data on employment and unemployment benefit receipt status are available for nearly all respondents, we are able to separate panel conditioning due to change in true status and panel conditioning due to change in self-report of the true status without depending on assumptions. Our results show that PASS respondents are more likely to change their true behavioural status the longer they stay in the panel. In addition, they are less likely to misreport their behavioural status the longer they stay in the panel.
