Design, Evaluation, and Analysis of Questionnaires for Survey Research, 2nd Edition

15

CORRECTION FOR MEASUREMENT ERRORS

Measurement errors will remain, no matter how much we do our best to improve the questions. That means that the estimates of the relationships between the variables will be affected by these errors. Therefore, it is necessary to correct for these errors. Thus, the most important application of our research on the quality of questions and composite scores is the use of the quality estimates for correction for measurement errors in the analysis between variables. In the past, complex procedures have been discussed for the correction of measurement errors using multiple indicators. In this chapter, we will present a very simple procedure for the correction of measurement errors that is not much more difficult than regression analysis or causal modeling without latent variables.

15.1 CORRECTION FOR MEASUREMENT ERRORS IN MODELS WITH ONLY CONCEPTS-BY-INTUITION

In this section, we want to show by a simple example how this can be done. The example we want to use is a model to explain opinions about immigration. Variables to explain this opinion have been collected in the third round of the ESS. Some of the questions have already been discussed. For this example, we suggest the model presented in Figure 15.1.

FIGURE 15.1 A simple model for explaining opinions about immigration.

The concepts presented in this model can be seen as concepts-by-intuition. ...