Abstract
The validity of empirical research often relies upon the accuracy of self-reported behavior and beliefs. Yet eliciting truthful answers in surveys is challenging, especially when studying sensitive issues such as racial prejudice, corruption, and support for militant groups. List experiments have attracted much attention recently as a potential solution to this measurement problem. Many researchers, however, have used a simple difference-in-means estimator, which prevents the efficient examination of multivariate relationships between respondents' characteristics and their responses to sensitive items. Moreover, no systematic means exists to investigate the role of underlying assumptions. We fill these gaps by developing a set of new statistical methods for list experiments. We identify the commonly invoked assumptions, propose new multivariate regression estimators, and develop methods to detect and adjust for potential violations of key assumptions. For empirical illustration, we analyze list experiments concerning racial prejudice. Open-source software is made available to implement the proposed methodology.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Political Science and International Relations,Sociology and Political Science
Reference77 articles.
1. A variant of this technique was originally proposed by Raghavarao and Federer (1979), who called it the block total response method. The method is also referred to as the item count technique (Miller 1984) or unmatched count technique (Dalton, Wimbush, and Daily 1994) and has been applied in a variety of disciplines (see, e.g., Droitcour et al. 1991; Wimbush and Dalton 1997; LaBrie and Earleywine 2000; Rayburn, Earleywine, and Davison 2003 among many others).
2. Misunderstandings between experimentalists and observationalists about causal inference
3. Several refinements based on this difference-in-means estimator and various variance calculations have been studied in the methodological literature (e.g., Raghavarao and Federer 1979; Tsuchiya 2005; Chaudhuri and Christofides 2007). Statistical Analysis of List Experiments
4. Sexual risk behaviors and alcohol: Higher base rates revealed using the unmatched‐count technique
Cited by
367 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献，注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献，订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献