Back to Overview of Sessions

Session Details

Multinational, multiregional, and multicultural (3MC) surveys are designed with the goal of comparability across more than one population. To achieve comparability, these surveys need to be carefully designed according to state-of-the-art principles and standards. Numerous 3MC surveys are currently conducted within the realms of official statistics, academia, and the private sectors, and have become increasingly important to global and regional policy-making. While the success of 3MC surveys hinges on the comparability or equivalence of data across many cultures and countries, the challenges of documentation, survey quality assessment procedures and criteria are far more complex than in single-country surveys.

Discussion around survey quality and the application of various quality approaches and frameworks in 3MC surveys has increased in recent years. For example, the total survey error (TSE) framework, widely accepted as the organizing framework in the design and evaluation of single-country surveys, is being increasingly applied to 3MC surveys. Others have combined TSE along with additional approaches to survey quality including fitness for intended use and survey production process quality in integrated frameworks. In the 3MC setting, these efforts have expanded to include the concept of ‘comparison error’, which is the error introduced across each stage of a 3MC survey as well as the aggregate of error across all stages (Smith, 2011). Further, work is currently underway on an AAPOR/WAPOR task force on the quality of comparative surveys. Less attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which 3MC surveys incorporate these or other perspectives in their quality assurance and quality control frameworks or overall survey quality assessment, and what standards, if any, should be put in place for 3MC surveys.

The objective of this session is to explore the ways in which overall quality—as opposed to specific QA/QC systems or approaches—is addressed in the 3MC survey setting, and the ways in which different quality frameworks can be used to assess the extent to which different surveys address both the causes and impacts of comparison error. The first paper in the session will outline the history and theoretical framework of quality in the 3MC context, and we invite subsequent papers detailing specific approaches to overall survey quality employed in current practice by 3MC surveys.