3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
550 General Services Building, 550 General Services Building University of Alberta , Edmonton Alberta
Title: Stated preference methods during a public opinion polling crisis: Who’s picking up the phone, and does it matter?
Speaker: Dr. Patrick Lloyd-Smith, Associate Professor, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics Global, Institute for Water Security, University of Saskatchewan
Date: Friday, April 5, 2024
Time: 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Location: 550 General Services Building
Abstract:
The rise of stated preference (SP) methods as the most prevalent environmental valuation technique has occurred alongside dropping survey response rates and growing concerns about the accuracy of public opinion polling. While there has been substantial progress made on improving the validity of SP survey responses (i.e. measurement error), the widespread use of cheap, opt-in internet panels raise questions around who is, and isn’t, taking our surveys and the resulting representativeness errors. What can we learn from such nonprobability-based online surveys that are far removed from the ideals of probability-based sampling theory? This paper adapts the total survey error framework to illustrate the trade-offs between measurement and representativeness errors for SP research. We then move on to discuss potential solutions for survey practitioners using non-representative samples including model-based and design-based approaches. We demonstrate these approaches using data collected from a recent national survey of freshwater ecosystem restoration.
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