Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Roundtable: Data in Crisis

(Tools of Analysis: Methods, Data, Informatics and Research Design)

Household surveys, one of the main innovations in social science research of the last century, are threatened by declining accuracy and reliability. That decline may be due to a variety of factors, such as reduced cooperation of respondents, data privacy and security concerns, changes in how survey respondents are contacted and perhaps because there is some belief that collected data do not provide meaningful information. The decline in quality of these traditional data sets raises important ethical issues that all data creators—especially researchers and practitioners—and users must take seriously. In this roundtable, participants will discuss a number of important issues regarding the decline in social science data accuracy and reliability. • What factors are driving the decline in social science data? • Is administrative data a panacea? • Is there a point at which traditional surveys are no longer valid? • What can and should researchers do to address these data bias issues? This roundtable discussion brings together experts in the field of data creation and research: Martha Stinson is a Senior Economist in the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau and has worked with numerous Census data sets to assess quality and measurement error. David Johnson, formerly at the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, is the Deputy Director of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) leading the team that constructs and disseminates the PSID. Marianne Bitler, is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis, whose research focuses on the effects of government safety net programs and has considered participation and expenditure differential reporting across survey and administrative data. Bruce Meyer, the McCormick Foundation Professor at Chicago Harris, studies, among others, the implications of linked survey-administrative data on assessing government safety net programs. Jonathan Schwabish, Senior Research Associate and Data Visualization Specialist at the Urban Institute, will serve as moderator of the discussion.