This course will provide an introduction to survey research methods for designing multinational and multicultural surveys. It begins with an overview of the field of comparative surveys. This will summarize their history and discuss some unique design features and implementation challenges inherent in their design and implementation.

The second section discusses quality and risk management frameworks for comparative surveys. It will present some tools for monitoring quality processes and outcomes, and will reference the new Guidelines for Comparative Surveys (ccsg.isr.umich.edu). The third section of the course focuses on issues in study design, considering organizational structure, data collection infrastructure and management, and cost and quality tradeoffs.

The second half of the course addresses instrument design for comparative surveys. It opens with a discussion of issues in defining objectives, identifying constructs, developing questions, and monitoring design process quality that are particular to the field of comparative surveys. It will also cover some technical challenges in crafting the questions into a survey instrument; visual display of text in various languages, placement of response categories and instructions, use of color, screen density, and other features of contemporary survey instruments will be reviewed from a multilingual and multicultural context. The links between design and mode considerations are also covered. The course concludes with a module on question adaptation and translation focusing on the critical role that version production often plays.

Examples will be drawn from demographic and social indicator surveys, attitudinal surveys, health and education surveys, and quality of life surveys.

Instructor: Emily Peytcheva

Emilia Peytcheva is a research survey methodologist with RTI International. She holds a PhD. in survey methodology from the University of Michigan. Peytcheva's research expertise includes measurement error-inducing factors in cross-cultural research and the interplay among survey errors and their combined effect on total survey error. Her interests include methods for minimizing measurement error induced by the survey questionnaire. Peytcheva is also one of the instructors for the required CPSM course titled Questionnaire Design. 

This course will count as 4.0 CPSM short course credit hours.