Conferences

Inaugural Early Career Researcher Award Winner 2011

The winner is Jorre Vannnieuwenhuyze, CeSO: University of Leuven

The Inaugural ESRA Early Career Researcher Award was organised for the first time at the 2011 ESRA conference in Lausanne, July 18-22. There were 16 proposals. The procedure: the prize committee contained four members: Juan Manuel Baptista (Esade Barcelona), Vasja Vehovar (Univ of Ljubljana), Han Oud (Radbout University Nijmegen), and Jaak Billiet (chair of the committee, University of Leuven).
The procedure contained two steps: first the selection of a short list by 22 reviewers (two per paper), and second the selection of a winner from the short list by three members of the prize committee. The four selected candidates of the short list were (in alphabetical order):

Ian Brunton-Smith Department of Sociology University of Surrey “Is success in obtaining contact and cooperation correlated with the magnitude of interviewer variance?” With: Patrick Sturgis (University of Southampton) and Joel Williams (BMRM: London)

Rafael Studer Department of Economics: University of Zurich “Specification and estimation of rating scale models (with an application to the determinants of life satisfaction”. With: Rainer Winkelmann (CESifo: Munich and IZA: Bonn)

Dmitryi Poznak CeSO: University of Leuven “Making presentation meaningful: Application of multi-group structural equation modeling and Stimson’s dyadic ratio algorithm to testing measurement comparability of latent constructs over time”

Jorre Vannieuwenhuyze CeSO: University of Leuven “Evaluating Relative Mode Effects in Mixed-Mode Surveys: Three methods to disentangle selection and measurement effects”. With: Geert Loosveldt (CeSO: University of Leuven)

The chair of the committee did not take part in the final selection step. The winner of the 2011 Inaugural ESRA Early Career Researcher Award was selected from this short list on the basis of the obtained scores and assessments by all three members of the Jury.

Jorre Vannnieuwenhuyze tackles an awkward problem in survey methodology. If you perform a mixed-mode survey and the results differ between modes, what part of the difference is caused by selection effects and what part by measurement effects? The authors give a nice and rather complete theoretical overview of the methods that are used in the past to answer this problem. They clearly expose problematic assumptions of the most widely used methods of studying mode effects, and propose two possible alternatives. The paper deals with the insights from a formal point of view and outlines the potential advantages and disadvantages of each alternative. In full awareness of the limits of the proposed methods, this paper offers a more than welcome addition to current practices in the field.

The committee congratulates the winner and the selected researchers in the short list, and thank all the candidates who have participated in the competition.