Measurement quality of social support survey measurement instruments

Abstract

Social network items have been included in several cross-national surveys (e.g., Generations and Gender Programme, European Quality of Life Survey, International Social Survey Programme). In these surveys, several different methods and questionnaire items are applied to measure similar or identical constructs. These methods are the name generator method and the simplified role relation method. These methods differ significantly in terms of complexity, cost and respondent (and interviewer) burden. In this paper, we would like to establish whether an estimation of network composition, assessed in percentages of family members, partner, friends etc. can be obtained by a simpler method than the name generator method without reducing the measurement quality of network composition indices. The study uses data from two experiments conducted in 2006 and 2008 on convenience quota samples. The correlated uniqueness model for multitrait-multimethod designs adapted to compositional data is used for estimating data quality indices. Besides the name generator and simplified role relation methods, we also compare the event-related method. The main findings are that the name generator method offers the highest measurement quality followed by the simplified role relation methods with two provider choices and the simplified role relation method with one provider choice. The event-related method has the lowest measurement quality. The partner over the family ratio was measured with the highest quality amongst all methods while the non-family over family ratio had the lowest. The strength of a tie is an important factor when it comes to measurement quality.