The global increase in population ageing, especially in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs), has created greater need for population-based surveys that document the health and social requirements of older adults in this context. The surveys fielded in response to this need ask questions adapted from ongoing surveys in High Income Countries; hence it is important to pretest the adapted questions for interpretability and cultural appropriateness using methods such as cognitive interviewing. The aim of this paper is to highlight challenges in the administration of cognitive interviews in LMICs with older adults, based on our pretest of a new population …

Education is a key variable in survey-based research, impacting various outcomes and serving as a cornerstone in social stratification research. However, measuring education in cross-national surveys is challenging due to the complexity and variability of educational systems across countries. For comparative research, the education variable does not only need to be valid, but also comparable across countries, which implies a similar degree of validity in different countries. Simultaneously, education measures need to be parsimonious, especially for self-administered surveys. This study, expanding on previous research, evaluates the validity and comparability of 16 alternative education coding specifications using nearly 400 dependent variables …

This research note examines the implications of the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) for the measurement of ethnic segregation in Hamburg, Germany, utilizing 2011 census data and a simulation-based approach that incorporates 10 distinct spatial operationalizations. The results indicate that spatially adjusted global segregation estimates demonstrate a marked resilience to MAUP, despite the correlations between German and foreign populations exhibiting pronounced volatility, which undermines the reliability and comparability of the findings. Moreover, local segregation measures are found to be acutely sensitive to scale and zoning choices, particularly in areas distinguished by heterogeneous distributions of characteristics. In contrast, regions exhibiting homogeneous …

In this paper we document our experience with conducting the Perceptions of Inequality and Redistribution Survey (PIRS), which is an online, multi-round survey conducted among Nigerian adults who were recruited via a Facebook ad campaign. The paper discusses our initial and unsuccessful recruitment strategy as well as our subsequent revised strategy in which we were able to effectively address the problems and pitfalls which caused our initial recruitment strategy to be unsuccessful. By discussing both strategies in detail, we provide original methodological and practical insights into how best to conduct online surveys with compensation in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) …