Longitudinal surveys ask the same people the same questions over time. So questionnaires tend to be rather boring for respondents after a while. “Are you asking me this again, you asked that last year as well!” is what many respondents probably think during an interview. As methodologists who manage panel surveys, we know this process may be rather boring, but in order to document change over time, we just need to ask respondents the same questions over and over.
**Poll volatility **
Below, you find the summed changes in parliamentary seats over all parties in consecutive opinion polls for the four main polling firms in the Netherlands in the lead up to the 2012 elections. I will update the table below in the next weeks.
This overview follows from my earlier post on Dependent Interviewing. Maurice de Hond (peil.nl) is the only survey pre-loading earlier voter preferences into survey questions.
I was re-reading one of the papers I wrote as part of my dissertation on survey data quality in panel surveys. The paper deals with the effects of the introduction of an interviewing technique called Dependent Interviewing in the British Household Panel Survey. I wrote this paper together with Annette Jackle, and if you are interested after reading the next bit, you can download a working paper version of it here.