Sunghee Lee

University of Michigan | U-M · Institute for Social Research

Objectives. We examined the implications of the current recommended data collection practice of placing self-rated health (SRH) before specific health-related questions (hence, without a health context) to remove potential context effects, between Hispanics and non-Hispanics. Methods. We used 2 methodologically comparable surveys conducted in Engli...

Survey interview languages not only determine who is eligible to participate in certain surveys but may also influence survey estimates. We examined potential biases arising from the exclusion of linguistic minorities using the 2003 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), a multilingual survey. Although 88.3 percent of the interviews were conduc...

Examine the effect of including cell-phone numbers in a traditional landline random digit dial (RDD) telephone survey. The 2007 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS). CHIS 2007 is an RDD telephone survey supplementing a landline sample in California with a sample of cell-only (CO) adults. We examined the degree of bias due to exclusion of CO po...

We examined health status and access to care among Asian Americans by the following acculturation indicators: nativity, percent lifetime in the US, self-rated English proficiency, and interview language, to assess whether any measure better distinguishes acculturation. Data from the 2003 California Health Interview Survey were used to study the sam...

Acquiescent (ARS) and extreme response styles (ERS) can have detrimental effects on survey data and, for unknown reasons, are more frequently used by Latino than non-Latino white respondents. This exploratory study examined the influence of culture on these response styles by investigating their associations with individual-level cultural factors a...

Acquiescent response style (ARS), the tendency for survey respondents to agree with survey items, is of particular concern for increasing measurement error in surveys with populations who are more likely to acquiesce, such as Latino respondents in the U.S. In order to develop methods for reducing ARS, this study addressed two questions: (1) Does ad...

This study examined feasibility and methodological utilities of respondent driven sampling (RDS) for Korean immigrants. We conducted the Health and Life Study of Koreans (HLSK), a Web-based RDS study targeting foreign-born Korean Americans. Through chain referrals, n = 638 participated. Geographic coverage and estimates of HLSK were compared to for...

Background Acquiescent response style (ARS) refers to survey respondents’ tendency to choose response categories agreeing to questions regardless of their content and is hypothesized as a stable respondent trait. While what underlies acquiescence is debatable, the effect of ARS on measurement is clear: bias through artificially increased agreement...

Objectives: ativity and family support may influence attitudes and behaviors that delay or accelerate the disability process in older adults. The objectives of this study were twofold: 1) to evaluate nativity and migration cohort differences in trajectories of disability (assessed by activities of daily living [ADL]) among older Mexican Americans;...

Objectives. While valid assessment of subjective well-being (SWB) is at the forefront of ageing research, literature increasingly reports cross-cultural measurement invariance on scales designed to capture SWB. This study examines measurement properties of well-established SWB scales and their comparability between older Hispanics and Whites in the...

Health and Life Study of Koreans (HLSK) was a Web survey conducted as a part of a larger study, “Empirical Assessment of Respondent Driven Sampling from Total Survey Error Perspectives,” supported by the National Science Foundation (Award Number: SES-1461470, PI: Sunghee Lee). The larger study aims to examine operational as well as inferential prop...

Understand enrollment patterns in Medicaid expansion and how churn and disenrollment affect access to care. We conducted telephone surveys with a cohort of Medicaid expansion enrollees at 3 time points in 2016, 2017, and 2018 (N = 2,608, RR = 89.4%). Surveys measured health, access to care, and insurance status. Respondents who had no HMP/Medicaid...

Medicaid “community engagement” requirement (work, school, job training, job searching, or volunteering) waivers have received CMS approval in nine states, but there are little data on current trends in Medicaid enrollees’ engagement in these activities. Our objective was to assess longitudinal changes in enrollees’ employment and student status af...

Importance Evidence about the health benefits of Medicaid expansion has been mixed and has largely come from comparing expansion and nonexpansion states. Objective To examine the self-reported health of enrollees in Michigan’s Medicaid expansion, the Healthy Michigan Plan (HMP), over time. Design, Setting, and Participants A telephone survey from...

Respondent driven sampling (RDS) is a sampling method designed for hard-to-sample groups with strong social ties. RDS starts with a small number of arbitrarily selected participants (“seeds”). Seeds are issued recruitment coupons, which are used to recruit from their social networks. Waves of recruitment and data collection continue until reaching...

Self-rated health (SRH) and subjective life expectancy (SLE) are widely used for understanding health and predicting mortality. However, what these items measure remains unclear, due to the lack of conceptual frameworks. We administered a web survey across the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, and Mexico. The questionnaire included SRH...

Importance Medicaid community engagement requirements (work, school, job searching, or community service) are being implemented by several states for the first time, but the association of Medicaid coverage with enrollees’ employment and school attendance is unclear. Objective To assess longitudinal changes in enrollees’ employment or student stat...

Introduction: Michigan is one of 3 states that have implemented health risk assessments for enrollees as a feature of its Medicaid expansion, the Healthy Michigan Plan. This study describes primary care providers' early experiences with completing health risk assessments with enrollees and examines provider- and practice-level factors that affect...

Background Medicaid expansion in Michigan, known as the Healthy Michigan Plan (HMP), emphasizes primary care and preventive services.Objective Evaluate the impact of enrollment in HMP on access to and receipt of care, particularly primary care and preventive services.DesignTelephone survey conducted during January–November 2016 with stratified rand...

Background: Given the rising incidence of opioid overdose in the United States, naloxone access is critical for high-risk populations, such as persons who inject drugs (PWID). Yet not all PWID have access to this life-saving antidote. With PWID in Michigan recruited via respondent driven sampling in 2017, after the 2016 standing order expanding na...

Objectives. To examine measurement comparability of a Spanish version of self-rated health (SRH) with pasable as an alternative to regular for the response category “fair” in the English version. Methods. We translated “fair” into 2 Spanish versions: regular and pasable. We implemented a split-half experiment in 3 surveys independently conducted fr...

Objectives: The study objective was to assess the impact of Medicaid expansion on health and employment outcomes among enrollees with and without a behavioral health disorder (either a mental or substance use disorder). Methods: Between January and October 2016, the authors conducted a telephone survey of 4,090 enrollees in the Michigan Medicaid...

Acquiescence is often defined as the systematic selection of agreeable (“strongly agree”) or affirmative (“yes”) responses to survey items, regardless of item content or directionality. This definition implies that acquiescence is immune to item characteristics; however, the influence of item characteristics on acquiescence remains largely unexplor...

Background It is uncertain how Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act influences the diagnosis of chronic health conditions, and the care and health of enrollees with chronic conditions. Objective Describe the prevalence of new and pre-existing chronic health conditions among Medicaid expansion enrollees. Examine whether perceived change...

Background: Through its influence on social interactions, simpatía may have a wide-ranging influence on Latinx health. Simpatía-which does not have a direct English translation-refers to being perceived as likeable, pleasant, and easygoing. Research to investigate the influence simpatía on Latinx health is limited, likely due to a lack of options...

Personalismo may have a broad influence on the well-being of U.S. Latinos by shaping social networks and, in turn, access to information and resources. However, research on personalismo is currently constrained by the lack of a psychometrically sound measure of this cultural construct. This research used a mixed-methods approach to develop a person...

Background Michigan expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (Healthy Michigan Plan [HMP]) to improve the health of low-income residents and the state’s economy. Objective To understand HMP’s impact on enrollees’ health, ability to work, and ability to seek employment Design Mixed methods study, including 67 qualitative interviews and 4090...

Reporting heterogeneity can pose significant challenges in comparisons of data from surveys in multinational, multiregional, and multicultural (3MC) contexts. To deal with reporting heterogeneity issues, the use of anchoring vignettes was proposed. This method allows researchers to correct for differential response scale usage in cross‐cultural or...

This chapter briefly discusses the operational challenges and choices specific to questionnaire design in multinational, multicultural, or multiregional (3MC) surveys. An operational challenge in comparative questionnaire design relates to the instrument technical design – that is, the format, layout, numbering, and so forth. The chapter considers...

This chapter provides a theoretical background on probabilistic reasoning and discusses the state‐of‐the‐art application of subjective probability questions in surveys around the world. It describes measurement mechanisms for subjective probability questions with a special focus on the influence of cultural orientations pertinent to response patter...

Measurement equivalence or invariance is the prerequisite for cross‐cultural survey research. One of the most commonly studied measurement errors in cross‐cultural survey research is response style. This chapter focuses on two types of response styles, namely, acquiescent response style (ARS) and extreme response style (ERS), and demonstrates sever...

One of the implicit assumptions in survey research is lower response rates by sexual minorities than by nonminorities. With rapidly changing public attitudes toward same-sex marriage, we reconsider this assumption. We used data from the 2013 and 2014 National Health Interview Survey that include contact history data for all sample families as well...

Background: Michigan's approach to Medicaid expansion, the Healthy Michigan Plan (HMP), emphasizes primary care, prevention, and incentives for patients and primary care practitioners (PCPs). Objective: Assess PCPs' perspectives about the impact of HMP on their patients and practices. Design: In 2014-2015, we conducted semi-structured intervie...

Research indicates that Latino survey respondents are more likely to acquiesce than non-Latino European Americans (EAs), thereby decreasing the potential for measurement invariance across cultural groups. To better understand what drives this culturally patterned response style, we examined the influence of respondent and interviewer characteristic...

This study attempted to integrate key assumptions in Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) into the Total Survey Error (TSE) perspectives and examine TSE as a new framework for a systematic assessment of RDS errors. Using two publicly available data sets on HIV-at-risk persons, nonresponse error in the RDS recruitment process and measurement error in ne...

Book Review in a peer-reviewed journal

Time orientation is an unconscious yet fundamental cognitive process that provides a framework for organizing personal experiences in temporal categories of past, present, and future, reflecting the relative emphasis given to these categories. Culture lies central to individuals’ time orientation, leading to cultural variations in time orientation....

Likert scales are popular for measuring attitudes, but response style, a source of measurement error associated with this type of question, can result in measurement bias. This study investigates the effect of data collection mode on both types of response styles using data from the 2012 American National Election Studies (ANES). 2012 was the 1 yea...

Aim: In China, hand surgeons treat fewer rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients compared to other countries. We investigated whether physician and surgeon knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding RA hand deformities reflect current evidence and may contribute to the low utilization of surgery. Method: We surveyed hand surgeons and rheumatologist...

Purpose: This study examines the effect of question context created by order in questionnaires on three subjective well-being measures: life satisfaction, self-rated health, and subjective life expectancy. Methods: We conducted two Web survey experiments. The first experiment (n = 648) altered the order of life satisfaction and self-rated health...

Subjective life expectancy (SLE) has been suggested as a predictor of mortality and mortality-related behaviors. Although critical for culturally diverse societies, these findings do not consider cross-cultural methodological comparability. Culture-specific reporting heterogeneity is a well-known phenomenon introducing biases, and research on this...

Although Likert scales in agree-disagree (A/D) format are popular in surveys, the data quality yielded by them is controversial among researchers. Recognizing the measurement issues involved with the A/D format, researchers have developed other question formats to measure attitudes. In this study, we focused on an alternative question type, the ite...

This chapter focuses on methods for sampling rare populations in health surveys. It begins with a definition of rare populations, considering reasons why it may be necessary to study rare groups, and then gives an overview of some of the issues associated with designing a sample of a rare group. The chapter considers a number of design alternatives...

Global self-rated health (SRH) is defined as an individual's perceived overall health and is both a concept frequently used in research and a popular measurement item in health surveys. This chapter examines the utility of SRH in the public health literature and then provides its theoretical underpinnings deduced from cognitive psychology as popula...

Surveys are used extensively in psychology, sociology and business, as well as many other areas, but they are becoming increasingly difficult to conduct. Some segments of the population are hard to sample, some are hard to find, others are hard to persuade to participate in surveys, and still others are hard to interview. This book offers the first...

Sampling households using commercial lists has the potential to reduce costs and efficiently identify some subgroups for which target sample sizes are desired. However, the information on the lists for demographics like age is usually incomplete and inaccurate. We demonstrate that this inexact information can still be used to improve the efficiency...

The aim of this study is to examine context effects created by the question order for self-rated health (SRH) by race/ethnicity and language. Differences in SRH estimates for non-Hispanic Whites and Hispanics were first examined with multiple observational data that asked SRH in different contexts. To examine context effects by socio-demographics a...

We agree with Kawada that the ideal data set for our study would include a confounder-free experiment that asks the self-rated health (SRH) question in different contexts (or order) and follows study participants over time to assess subsequent morbidity and mortality. This data set does not exist. As an approximation with minimal methodological non...

We report on two experiments to encourage record use by respondents in an Internet survey. The experiments were conducted in the 2009 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) Internet Survey, administered to those in the HRS panel with Internet access, and in the 2011 HRS Internet Survey. Encouraging respondents to consult records at the relevant point in...

Despite concerns about nonresponse bias due to decreasing response rates, telephone surveys remain a viable option for conducting local population-based surveillance. However, this becomes problematic for urban populations, which typically have higher nonresponse rates. Unfortunately, traditional methods of evaluating nonresponse bias pose challeng...

We examined whether the widespread assumption that Hispanics are subject to greater noncoverage bias in landline telephone surveys because they are more likely than other ethnic groups to use cell phones exclusively was supported by data. Data came from the 2010 National Health Interview Survey and the 2009 California Health Interview Survey. We co...

Web surveys have been adopted as a practical data collection tool notably due to their economic nature and a fast turn-around time. One popular type of Web survey bases the sample on a group of Internet users who voluntarily join survey panels. Often labeled as a "volunteer panel Web survey," this approach is widely used in various social science s...

Dual frame telephone surveys are becoming common in the U.S. because of the incompleteness of the landline frame aspeople transition to cell phones. This article examines nonsampling errors in dual frame telephone surveys. Even thoughnonsampling errors are ignored in much of the dual frame literature, we find that under some conditions substantial...

Background. With a history of over 100 years, Korean immigration to U.S. experiences a rapid growth from mere 11,171 Korean immigrants in 1960 to 1.4 million Koreans living in U.S. in 2005. Nearly seven out of ten Korean immigrants were born outside of US, and Korean immigrants are the seventh largest foreign-born group. The fact that close to a ha...

We examined potential nonresponse bias in a large-scale, population-based, random-digit-dialed telephone survey in California and its association with the response rate. We used California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) data and US Census data and linked the two data sets at the census tract level. We compared a broad range of neighborhood characte...

Current practices recommend placing a self-rated health question before specific health items in survey questionnaires to minimize potential order effects. Because this recommendation is based on data collected in English, its applicability to other languages is unknown. This study examines whether there is an order effect associated with self-rate...

A combination of propensity score and calibration adjustment is shown to reduce bias in volunteer panel Web surveys. In this combination, the design weights are adjusted by propensity scores to correct for selection bias due to nonrandomized sampling. These adjusted weights are then calibrated to control totals for the target population and correct...

Racial classification is a paramount concern in data collection and analysis for American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs) and has far-reaching implications in health research. We examine how different racial classifications affect survey weights and consequently change health-related indicators for the AI/AN population in California. Using a ve...

Introduction Origin of Propensity Score Adjustment Weighting Adjustment using Propensity Scores Conclusion

We conducted an experiment that compared different versions of a set of disability questions (including the questions included on the Census 2000 Long Form). Disability items are prone to a number of methodological problems, including inconsistency over time and self-proxy differences. Our experimental versions were designed to reduce these problem...

This article describes several features included in a California Health Interview Survey cell phone pilot study that differ from earlier cell phone surveys conducted in the United States. One difference is that the study used a screening design and only adults living in cell-only households were interviewed. Most of the previous studies used dual f...

This study examines nonresponse and coverage errors separately in a probability Web panel survey by applying traditional postsurvey adjustments. This was done by using variables whose estimates were obtainable at both the survey respondent and the full survey sample levels and whose values were known for both the full survey sample and the target p...

Propensity score adjustment (PSA) has been suggested as an approach to adjustment for volunteer panel web survey data. PSA attempts to decrease, if not remove, the biases arising from noncoverage, nonprobability sampling, and nonresponse in volunteer panel web surveys. Although PSA is an appealing method, its application in web survey practice is n...

Survey data collection from volunteer Web panels is growing in popularity. While this practice has obvious advantages in terms of cost, flexibility, and speed, esti- mates from such data for characteristics of the general population may be seriously biased due to low web penetration in the general population, nonprobability samples, and high nonres...

This technical report documents the methodology and properties for a series of weights that have been developed for cross-sectional analysis of individual data from the 1997-2009 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The PSID longitudinal analysis weights for individuals and families are documented in Heeringa et al. (2011) and Gouskova, et al. (2...