Frauke Kreuter

University of Maryland, College Park | UMD, UMCP, University of Maryland College Park · Joint Program in Survey Methodology

Linking digital trace data to existing panel survey data may increase the overall analysis potential of the data. However, producing linked products often requires additional engagement from survey participants through consent or participation in additional tasks. Panel operators may worry that such additional requests may backfire and lead to lowe...

We propose new ensemble models for multivariate functional data classification as combinations of semi-metric-based weak learners. Our models extend current semi-metric-type methods from the univariate to the multivariate case, propose new semi-metrics to compute distances between functions, and consider more flexible options for combining weak lea...

Research apps allow to administer survey questions and passively collect smartphone data, thus providing rich information on individual and social behaviours. Agreeing to this novel form of data collection requires multiple consent steps, and little is known about the effect of non-participation. We invited 4,293 Android smart-phone owners from the...

R package PracTools v.1.2.6. This package is also posted to the Comprehensive R Archive site (CRAN). The package contains functions and datasets to support Valliant, Dever, and Kreuter, Practical Tools for Designing and Weighting Survey Samples (2nd edition, 2018). Contains functions for sample size calculation for survey samples using stratified o...

Survey participants' mouse movements provide a rich, unobtrusive source of paradata, and offer insight into the response process beyond the observed answers. However, the use of mouse-tracking may require participants' explicit consent that their movements are recorded and analyzed. Thus, the fundamental question arises how this affects the willing...

Objectives: To examine the association of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) with anxiety and depressive symptoms among adults and determine if these associations varied by gender and age. Methods: We combined survey data from 16,177,184 adults from 43 countries who participated in the daily COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey via Facebook with...

The gold-standard approaches for gleaning statistically valid conclusions from data involve random sampling from the population. Collecting properly randomized data, however, can be challenging, so modern statistical methods, including propensity score reweighting, aim to enable valid inferences when random sampling is not feasible. We put forth an...

Manual for the R package PracTools v.1.2.5. Functions and datasets to support Valliant, Dever, and Kreuter, Practical Tools for Designing and Weighting Survey Samples (2nd edition, 2018). Contains functions for sample size calculation for survey samples using stratified or clustered one-, two-, and three-stage sample designs. Other functions comput...

Academic and public debates are increasingly concerned with the question whether and how algorithmic decision-making (ADM) may reinforce social inequality. Most previous research on this topic originates from computer science. The social sciences, however, have huge potentials to contribute to research on social consequences of ADM. Based on a proc...

Simultaneously tracking the global impact of COVID-19 is challenging because of regional variation in resources and reporting. Leveraging self-reported survey outcomes via an existing international social media network has the potential to provide standardized data streams to support monitoring and decision-making worldwide, in real time, and with...

The US COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey (CTIS) is a large, cross-sectional, internet-based survey that has operated continuously since April 6, 2020. By inviting a random sample of Facebook active users each day, CTIS collects information about COVID-19 symptoms, risks, mitigating behaviors, mental health, testing, vaccination, and other key prior...

Increasing the sample size of a survey is often thought to increase the accuracy of the results. However, an analysis of big surveys on the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines shows that larger sample sizes do not protect against bias. Estimates of vaccine uptake from big surveys show bias.

Background Guidelines and recommendations from public health authorities related to face masks have been essential in containing the COVID-19 pandemic. We assessed the prevalence and correlates of mask usage during the pandemic. Methods We examined a total of 13,723,810 responses to a daily cross-sectional online survey in 38 countries of people w...

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic is posing a global public health burden. These consequences have been shown to increase the risk of mental distress, but the underlying protective and risk factors for mental distress and trends over different waves of the pandemic are largely unknown. Furthermore, it is larg...

Algorithmic profiling is increasingly used in the public sector as a means to allocate limited public resources effectively and objectively. One example is the prediction-based statistical profiling of job seekers to guide the allocation of support measures by public employment services. However, empirical evaluations of potential side-effects such...

Survey research aims to collect robust and reliable data from respondents. However, despite researchers’ efforts in designing questionnaires, survey instruments may be imperfect, and question structure not as clear as could be, thus creating a burden for respondents. If it were possible to detect such problems, this knowledge could be used to predi...

The U.S. COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey (CTIS) is a large, cross-sectional, Internet-based survey that has operated continuously since April 6, 2020. By inviting a random sample of Facebook active users each day, CTIS collects information about COVID-19 symptoms, risks, mitigating behaviors, mental health, testing, vaccination, and other key pri...

The International Program in Survey and Data Science (IPSDS) is an online educational program, which can be attended through the Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM) at the University of Maryland (UMD) and a part-time Master of Applied Data Science & Measurement (MDM) at the University of Mannheim and Mannheim Business School (MBS). It is tar...

Simultaneously tracking the global COVID-19 impact across multiple populations is challenging due to regional variation in resources and reporting. Leveraging self-reported survey outcomes via an existing international social media network has the potential to provide reliable and standardized data streams to support monitoring and decision-making...

Smartphones sind für viele Menschen zu einem selbstverständlichen Bestandteil des Alltags geworden. Sie werden neben der Nutzung zur Kommunikation, Unterhaltung und Information auch bei der Jobsuche und im Arbeitsalltag genutzt (Perrin 2017). Dies bietet Möglichkeiten Smartphones als Datenerhebungsinstrument für die wissenschaftliche Forschung einz...

A central goal of survey research is to collect robust and reliable data from respondents. However, despite researchers' best efforts in designing questionnaires, respondents may experience difficulty understanding questions' intent and therefore may struggle to respond appropriately. If it were possible to detect such difficulty, this knowledge co...

Aims To examine changes in drinking behavior among US adults between March 10 and July 21, 2020, a critical period during the COVID-19 pandemic. Design Longitudinal, internet-based panel survey. Setting The Understanding America Study (UAS), a nationally-representative panel of US adults aged 18 or older. Participants 4,298 US adults who reporte...

The ability to ‘sense’ the social environment and thereby to understand the thoughts and actions of others allows humans to fit into their social worlds, communicate and cooperate, and learn from others’ experiences. Here we argue that, through the lens of computational social science, this ability can be used to advance research into human sociali...

In the wake of the digital revolution and connected technologies, societies store an ever-increasing amount of data on humans, their preferences, and behavior. These modern technologies create a trust challenge, insofar as individuals have to trust data collectors such as private organizations, government institutions, and researchers that their da...

The advent of powerful prediction algorithms led to increased automation of high-stake decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources such as government spending and welfare support. This automation bears the risk of perpetuating unwanted discrimination against vulnerable and historically disadvantaged groups. Research on algorithmic discri...

Background Cross-sectional studies have found that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has negatively affected population-level mental health. Longitudinal studies are necessary to examine trajectories of change in mental health over time and identify sociodemographic groups at risk for persistent distress. Purpose To examine the traj...

Across survey organizations around the world, there is increasing pressure to augment survey data with administrative data. In many settings, obtaining informed consent from respondents is required before administrative data can be linked. A key question is whether respondents understand the linkage consent request and if consent is correlated with...

Background: Guidelines and recommendations from public health authorities related to face masks have been essential in containing the COVID-19 pandemic. We assessed the prevalence and correlates of mask usage during the pandemic. Methods: We examined a total of 13,723,810 responses to a daily cross-sectional representative online survey in 38 count...

Within the survey context, a geofence can be defined as a geographical area that triggers a survey invitation when an individual enters the area, dwells in the area for a defined amount of time or exits the area. Geofences may be used to administer context-specific surveys, such as an evaluation survey of a shopping experience at a specific retail...

Audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (ACASI) has been widely used to collect sensitive information from respondents in face-to-face interviews. Interviewers ask questions that are not sensitive or only moderately sensitive and then allow respondents to self-administer more sensitive questions, listening to audio recordings of the questions and...

Objectives. To assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental distress in US adults. Methods. Participants were 5065 adults from the Understanding America Study, a probability-based Internet panel representative of the US adult population. The main exposure was survey completion date (March 10–16, 2020). The outcome was mental distress measur...

This chapter analyzes the effects of different incentive schemes on participation rates in a study combining self‐reports and passive data collection using smartphones, as well as breaks out these effects by economic subgroups. Providing some form of incentive, whether monetary or some other kind of token of appreciation, is common for studies recr...

Official statistics could be produced more quickly and less expensively than currently possible using surveys. Big Data may also provide statistics for small areas to make informed policy and program decisions This chapter uses social media data to produce similar attitude distributions as survey data. It explores deeper into each distribution to d...

This chapter reviews existing literature on concern with and willingness to engage in active and passive forms of mobile data collection. It describes four online surveys conducted in two countries that all administered a similar set of questions on concern with five different forms of mobile data collection. The chapter uses these data to analyze...

Hintergrund: Die SARS-CoV-2-Pandemie bringt Belastungen durch Überforderung des Gesundheitssystems, Lockdown der Wirtschaft, Kontakt-und Ausgangsbeschränkungen sowie Quarantänemaßnahmen mit sich. Diese Arbeit gibt einen Überblick über psychische Belastungen in der gegenwärtigen Pandemie und identifiziert protektive und Risikofaktoren. Methode: Ei...

As smartphones become increasingly prevalent, social scientists are recognizing the ubiquitous data generated by the sensors built into these devices as an innovative data source. Passively collected data from sensors that measure geolocation or movement provide an unobtrusive way to observe participants in everyday situations and are free from rea...

Functions and datasets to support Valliant, Dever, and Kreuter, Practical Tools for Designing and Weighting Survey Samples (2nd edition, 2018). Contains functions for sample size calculation for survey samples using stratified or clustered one-, two-, and three-stage sample designs. Other functions compute variance components for multistage designs...

Most individuals in the United States have no history of a mental health condition yet are at risk for psychological distress due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The objective of this study was to assess the frequency and risk and protective factors of psychological distress, during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, in this group. Data comes from t...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest public health crisis of the last 100 years. Countries have responded with various levels of lockdown to save lives and stop health systems from being overwhelmed. At the same time, lockdowns entail large socio-economic costs. One exit strategy under consideration is a mobile phone app that traces cl...

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest public health crisis of the last 100 years. Countries have responded with various levels of lockdown to save lives and stop health systems from being overwhelmed. At the same time, lockdowns entail large socio-economic costs. One exit strategy under consideration is a mobile phone app that traces clo...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest public health crisis of the last 100 years. Countries have responded with various levels of lockdown to save lives and stop health systems from being overwhelmed. At the same time, lockdowns entail large socio-economic costs. One exit strategy under consideration is a mobile phone app that traces c...

Researchers are combining self-reports from mobile surveys with passive data collection using sensors and apps on smartphones increasingly more often. While smartphones are commonly used in some groups of individuals, smartphone penetration is significantly lower in other groups. In addition, different operating systems (OSs) limit how mobile data...

Interviewer-respondent rapport is generally considered to be beneficial for the quality of the data collected in survey interviews; however, the relationship between rapport and data quality has rarely been directly investigated. We conducted a laboratory experiment in which eight professional interviewers interviewed 125 respondents to see how the...

Die Nachfrage nach gut ausgebildeten DatenwissenschaftlerInnen, die sowohl die Fähigkeiten besitzen, Daten auf „traditionellem Weg“ zu erheben und auszuwerten und ebenso mit großen semi- oder gar unstrukturierten Datensätzen zu arbeiten, steigt kontinuierlich an. In diesem Beitrag beschreiben wir, welche Kompetenzen Sozial- und MarktforscherInnen h...

Web surveys have become a standard mode of survey administration, in part because they offer greater technological capabilities so that aspects of the questionnaire's design can be dynamically controlled. Designers often use these features to help guide respondents through a survey, but web‐based designs also allow researchers to collect and analyz...

Appendix 8A Additional Evaluation of Derived NSFG Classes Figure A8A.1 Figure A8A.2 Table A8A.1 Table A8A.2 Table A8A.3 Appendix 8B Additional Details on ESS Items

Table A7A.1 Number of identical response patterns

Interviewer-administered surveys are a primary method of collecting information from populations across the United States and the world. Various types of interviewer-administered surveys exist, including large-scale government surveys that monitor populations (e.g., the Current Population Survey), surveys used by the academic community to understan...

Social media are becoming more popular as a source of data for social science researchers. These data are plentiful and offer the potential to answer new research questions at smaller geographies and for rarer subpopulations. When deciding whether to use data from social media, it is useful to learn as much as possible about the data and its source...

Survey researchers are increasingly seeking opportunities to link interview data with administrative records. However, obtaining consent from all survey respondents (or certain subgroups) remains a barrier to performing record linkage in many studies. We experimentally investigated whether emphasizing different benefits of record linkage to respond...

Survey questionnaires often contain skip patterns, which let respondents skip over entire sections or a set of follow‐up questions that do not apply to them, and thus allow them to proceed through the interview faster. Survey designers might ask how filter and follow‐up questions can be presented to reduce the risk of motivated underreporting. We d...

A major concern arising from ubiquitous tracking of individuals’ online activity is that algorithms may be trained to predict personal sensitive information, even for users who do not wish to reveal such information. Although previous research has shown that digital trace data can accurately predict sociodemographic characteristics, little is known...

Trust is praised by many social scientists as the foundation of functioning social systems owing to its assumed connection to cooperative behavior. The existence of such a link is still subject to debate. In the present study, we first highlight important conceptual issues within this debate. Second, we examine previous evidence, highlighting sever...

Numerous surveys link interview data to administrative records, conditional on respondent consent, in order to explore new and innovative research questions. Optimizing the linkage consent rate is a critical step toward realizing the scientific advantages of record linkage and minimizing the risk of linkage consent bias. Linkage consent rates have...

The rising penetration of smartphones now gives researchers the chance to collect data from smartphone users through passive mobile data collection via apps. Examples of passively collected data include geolocation, physical movements, online behavior and browser history, and app usage. However, to passively collect data from smartphones, participa...

This article examines the influence of interviewers on the estimation of regression coefficients from survey data. First, we present theoretical considerations with a focus on measurement errors and nonresponse errors due to interviewers. Then, we show via simulation which of several nonresponse and measurement error scenarios has the biggest impac...

The long-standing approach of using probability samples in social science research has come under pressure through eroding survey response rates, advanced methodology, and easier access to large amounts of data. These factors, along with an increased awareness of the pitfalls of the nonequivalent comparison group design for the estimation of causal...

More and more surveys are conducted online. While web surveys are generally cheaper and tend to have lower measurement error in comparison to other survey modes, especially for sensitive questions, potential advantages might be offset by larger nonresponse bias. This article compares the data quality in a web survey administration to another common...