About the workshop

The International Total Survey Error Workshop (ITSEW) is an ongoing series of annual workshops modeled on the stand-alone workshop held in Washington, DC in March 2005.

The purpose of ITSEW is to enable researchers, survey practitioners, and problem owners (for example from official statistics agencies) interested in total survey error to meet on a regular basis to:

• Review progress on important problems
• Define pressing current problems in detail, and articulate a research agenda to address them
• Form research collaborations to carry out needed research
• Identify emerging research needs at an early stage

ITSEW emphasizes current and future research gaps and is a complement to existing venues for presenting the results of ongoing and completed research. The ITSEW locations will vary.

The theme of the 2009 International Total Survey Error Workshop is The Total Survey Error Concept: Uses and Abuses. Consistent with this theme, there will be presentations of examples of applications where two or more error sources have been successfully analyzed in order to improve survey quality as well as exemplary studies of nonsampling error in surveys. Likewise, there will be reports of "abuses" or "failures" of the total survey error concept. Examples might include studies of nonsampling error that have gone awry, experiences with the costs of total survey error evaluations, experiments that were less than successful or that provided misleading results; other research that, though not 100% successful, still provide valuable lessons learned for future studies of total survey error.

Workshop presentations and discussions will cover some of the following topics:

* Simultaneous evaluations of the contributions to total survey error from two or more error sources; example, from nonresponse and response error.
* Interactions between error sources; example, the interplay between item nonresponse error and editing error or interviewer and respondent error.
* Methods for simulating the effects of multiple error sources on the Total Survey Error (TSE).
* The conceptualization and historical development of TSE.
* Reviews of the literature and meta-analyses of TSE.
* The impact of the TSE concept on survey methodology.
* Survey models and other representations of TSE.
* New methods for estimating the components of the mean squared error.
* Methodologies for comparing the TSE for two or more modes of data collection.
* Reports on efforts to evaluate TSE in complex surveys.
* Uses of quality profiles for understanding and minimizing TSE.
* Uses of prior estimates of nonsampling error in the design of new surveys or for allocating resources for survey error reduction.
* Exemplary studies of nonsampling error components, either planned or in progress.
* Clients' and other users' perceptions of the TSE concept.
* Continuations of work presented in earlier ITSEWs.

Previous ITSEWs were held in March 2005 in Washington DC and in June 2008 in Research Triangle Park, NC, U.S.A.

The presentations from ITSEW I are posted at http://www.niss.org/affiliates/totalsurveyerrorworkshop200503/tse_presentations.html.

The presentations from ITSEW II can be found at http://www.niss.org/ITSEW/2008/itsew2008_presentations.html

The 2009 ITSEW workshop Program Committee has the following members:

Lars Lyberg,
Statistics Sweden, Lars.Lyberg@scb.se (chair)

Eva Dahlquist Prince
Statistics Sweden, Eva.D.Prince@scb.se

Paul Biemer,
RTI, ppb@rti.org

Alan Karr,
NISS, karr@niss.org

Frauke Kreuter,
JPSM, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, fkreuter@survey.umd.edu

Peter Lynn,
University of Essex, Colchester, UK, plynn@ESSEX.AC.UK

Leyla Mohadjer,
Westat, Rockville, MD, USA, MOHADJL1@WESTAT.com

Marina Signore,
ISTAT, Rome, Italy, signore@istat.it

Site

Workshop Fee:

A workshop fee of 800 SEK per person will be collected on site to cover conference room, bus and a social activity.


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