There is a bit of a cloud over the conference this morning. A number of the papers were written by and to be presented by government people who could not travel yesterday because of the potential government shutdown. So people from the contractor side are taking up the slack and delivering the government papers.
The morning session's topic is "Advances in Measuring Health Status and Behaviors." There are five papers and they focus mostly in two areas: physical and cognitive capacity in the elderly and various ways of measuring mental impairment. I'm not going to go paper by paper. In a couple of months you'll be able to download them all from the NCHS site. Instead I'll make a couple of observations.
The first is the systematic and thorough way in which these folks go about developing questions, questionnaires, and the procedures to administer them. I was especially amused by testing of methods to measure mental and physical capacity among the elderly! Cognitive interviewing, field tests, and sophisticated measurement models are all part of the toolbox. Those of us in commercial MR seldom get the time and the money to do this kind of serious questionnaire development. Our questionnaires are often downright bad. Some of that is lack of training but a lot of it is putting together questionnaires under incredibly tight deadlines, and sometimes questionnaires that will only be used once. But if we are serious about increasing respondent engagement questionnaire design is going to need a lot more focus than it's currently getting.
The second observation is that these folks may start with very long interviews (an hour is not unusual) but they still struggle with the same issues we do in MR: controlling questionnaire length in the face of the constantly expanding need for more data. So we heard about "planned missing data designs" that administer only part of a long battery of questions to any one respondent and then the imputation models to support a full analysis.