I think it looks very good. I especially like the name rotation. I just had lunch with Stanley Lieberson in order to quiz him about research on how people interpret names. One of the ideas we came up with was to use the most frequently asked names from the soc sec administration, but your information is better since you know the respondents ex ante. Great. Do you have many minorities in your survey? That might be another dimension on which to vary respondent names, although at least outside of Milwaukee maybe this is not an issue in Wisconsin. Studying the effects of names, as one might study interviewer effects, also looks easy with your design, which is great. I assume the rotations are random or systematic? A minor point is that we don't quite get at the superstition effect since you'd be asking me about Gary in the third person, which I think would be interpreted (especially in light of your introduction to the vignettes) as a different person with he same name. No problem tho. Some other (also minor) points: - probably you need to change 3 km to some non-metric distance - I wonder whether you would want to reduce the ambiguity here. if the respondent didn't try to participate in vigorous activities but could have (I'm thinking of my colleagues sitting at their desks) the question doesn't really have an answer. - You might want to say "other _moderate_ physical activities" or perhaps some other word. without a modifier like that the first sentence could be interpreted to refer to a paraplegic, although this is obviously corrected by the second sentence. - Only because it sounds better, I'd delete 'with'. - this vignette explicitly mentions the object of worry (health) whereas the others in this set do not. That risks respondents thinking about a different dimension than you intended. So I think I'd edit out the referent. Gary : Gary King, King(a)Harvard.Edu http://GKing.Harvard.Edu : : Center for Basic Research Direct (617) 495-2027 : : in the Social Sciences Assistant (617) 495-9271 : : 34 Kirkland Street, Rm. 2 HU-MIT DC (617) 495-4734 : : Harvard U, Cambridge, MA 02138 eFax (928) 832-7022 : On Fri, 18 Oct 2002, Jeremy Freese wrote: - vign mailing list served by Harvard-MIT Data Center List Address: vign(a)latte.harvard.edu Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.hmdc.harvard.edu/?info=vign

On Mon, 21 Oct 2002, Jeremy Freese wrote: [material deleted, all of which I agree with] My personal view is that all research on the cutting edge is almost by definition highly error prone and uncertain (in part because when its not, we usually ask harder questions), and we always think of plenty of things after the fact we would like to have done differently. And so when we actually know of real improvements that could feasibly be made ahead of time, I'd rather make them (if indeed they are improvements). This would seem to contradict the advantage of having questions comparable across surveys, and that may indeed be the case (and if so I might still do it since comparability even across all your respondents is an important goal in its own right). However, the vast majority of the WHS instruments are translated into many other languages. Since it is supposedly the meaning of the questions rather than the exact words used that are translated, you might view many of the improvements as better translations of this meaning into English. And so, assuming the translators understand the questions in the same way as you do, maybe there is somewhat less of a contradiction, Gary : Gary King, King(a)Harvard.Edu http://GKing.Harvard.Edu : : Center for Basic Research Direct (617) 495-2027 : : in the Social Sciences Assistant (617) 495-9271 : : 34 Kirkland Street, Rm. 2 HU-MIT DC (617) 495-4734 : : Harvard U, Cambridge, MA 02138 eFax (928) 832-7022 : - vign mailing list served by Harvard-MIT Data Center List Address: vign(a)latte.harvard.edu Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.hmdc.harvard.edu/?info=vign