Everything You Need to Consider When Deciding to Field a Survey of Jews: Choices in Survey Methods and Their Consequences on Quality

Abstract

Jewish community research and demography has seen its share of challenges in the past decade. These challenges, such as substantially decreased rates of participation and the decline of landline ownership, may have particular impact on Jewish community research but are in fact broader overarching trends. This paper documents these trends and notes research showing that while cost in probability surveys have gone up as a consequence, data quality has remained consistently strong. Research comparing telephone research to online Internet surveys shows substantially better data quality in telephone research, even with very low response rates, and these differences can be particularly true in Jewish research. I provide a typical typology of errors found in survey research and afford the reader ways in which such errors can occur in Jewish community research, and how to avoid such errors. The paper then briefly reviews common approaches to Jewish community research and discusses each in the context of the typology of potential survey errors. As is noted elsewhere in the papers of this journal, despite increased costs, RDD telephone remains a uniquely powerful and useful data gathering tool for Jewish community research, to the extent that to date, no other approach executed has yet to result in survey estimates which have not been out-of-trend with past surveys in the same community as well as trends found in similar communities nationwide. The challenge of survey research then continues to be in finding designs that incorporate RDD interviewing with other methods that may be less desirable in terms of data quality but are significantly less costly to administer.