Worried about survey bias? We have updated our add-on (or ado) surveybias, which calculates our multinomial generalisation of the old Martin, Traugott, and Kennedy (2005) measure for survey bias. If you have any dichotomous or multinomial variable in your survey whose true distribution is known (e.g. from the census, electoral counts, or other official data),…
Meet one reviewer from hell. Or perhaps not
In this post (the second in a mini-series of posts on our Stata add-on surveybias), we demonstrate how to analyse survey bias in the absence of raw data, using our command surveybiasi.
The shiny and new version 1.1 of our Stata addon surveybias is out. Surveybias estimates accuracy measures for pre-election polls and similar surveys where the true distribution of some categorical variable is known. Here is the lowdown.
Somewhat foolishly, my university has granted me access to Mogon: not the god, not the death metal band but rather their supercomputer, which currently holds the 182th spot in the top 500 list of the fastest computers on the planet. It has some 34,000+ cores and more than 80 TB of RAM, but basically it’s just a very large bunch of Linux boxes. That means that I have a rough idea how to handle it, and that it happily runs my native Linux Stata and MPlus (and hopefully Jags) binaries for me. It also has R installed, and this is where my misery began.
The new version of our Stata module surveybias has now appeared on SSC. From within Stata, simply run ssc install surveybias, all to install it (no surprise here). For the time being, the article on which the module is based has been ungated. Get it while it is free.
We have updated our Stata package surveybias, which estimates bias in pre-election polls and other surveys where the true distribution is known. A new feature facilitates the en masse comparison of surveys collected before an election. Also in this release: somewhat better documentation and toy data to get you started.
Replication data for our forthcoming Political Analysis paper on our new, multinomial accuracy measure for bias in opinion surveys (e.g. pre-election polls) has just come online at the PA dataverse.
BinaryApe / Foter / CC BYIn a recent paper, we derive various multinomial measures of bias in public opinion surveys (e.g. pre-election polls). Put differently, with our methodology, you may calculate a scalar measure of survey bias in multi-party elections. Thanks to Kit Baum over at Boston College, our Stata add-on surveybias.ado is now available…
All surveys deviate from the true distributions of the variables, but some more so than others. This is particularly relevant in the context of election studies, where the true distribution of the vote is revealed on election night. Jocelyn Evans and I present a method for calculating a scalar measure that neatly summarises such bias for multi-party elections. We also present a Stata module that implements our new method.