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We tested a novel extension to mailed invitations to a web-push survey, using a postcard invitation to deliver a scratch-off giftcode incentive similar to an instant-win lottery ticket. Scratch-off postcards were included as one of five conditions in randomized survey experiment varying two mailing types (letter and postcard) and three incentive types (prepaid cash, prepaid giftcodes, and conditional giftcodes). Invitations were sent to a sample of 17,808 addresses in Boston, Massachusetts, recruiting for a new online panel study of city residents. We report response rates and costs for each condition. Findings suggest that letters achieve higher response rates than postcards and are more cost effective overall. We also find that conditional incentives achieve higher response rates and are more cost effective, although conflating factors do not permit clear inferences. Notably, the novel scratch-off postcard condition achieved the lowest response rate and the highest costs per completed survey.

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to compare results of using web-based and mail (postal) Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) data collection protocols. RESEARCH DESIGN Patients who had been hospitalized in a New England Hospital were surveyed about their hospital experience. Patients who provided email addresses were randomized to 1 of 3 data collection protocols: web-alone, web with postal mail follow-up, and postal mail only. Those who did not provide email addresses were surveyed using postal mail only. Analyses compared response rates, respondent characteristics, and patient-reported experiences. SUBJECTS For an 8-week period, patients were discharged from the study hospital to home. MEASURES Measures included response rates, characteristics of respondents, 6 composite measures of their patient experiences, and 2 ratings of the hospital. RESULTS Response rates were significantly lower for the web-only protocol than the mail or combined protocols, and those who had not provided email addresses had lower response rates. Those over 65 were more likely than others to respond to all protocols, especially for the mail-only protocols. Respondents without email addresses were older, less educated, and reported worse health than those who provided email addresses. After adjusting for respondent differences, those in the combined protocol differed significantly from the mail (postal) only respondents on 2 measures of patient experience; those in the web-only protocol differed on one. Those not providing an email address differed from those who did on one measure. CONCLUSION If web-based protocols are used for HCAHPS surveys, adjustments for a mode of data collection are needed to make results comparable.

To what extent do survey nonresponse and coverage problems bias estimates of physical activity? Research has focused on social desirability as a cause of observed bias but there are relatively few ...

With declining response rates and challenges of using RDD sampling for telephone surveys, collecting data from address-based samples has become more attractive. Two approaches are doing telephone interviews at telephone numbers matched to addresses and asking those at sampled addresses to call into an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to answer questions. This study used in-person interviewing to evaluate the effects of nonresponse and problems matching telephone numbers when telephone and IVR were used as the initial modes of data collection. The survey questions were selected from major US federal surveys covering a variety of topics. Both nonresponse and, for telephone, inability to find matches result in important nonresponse error for nearly half the measures across all topics, even after adjustments to fit the known demographic characteristics of the residents. Producing credible estimates requires using supplemental data collection strategies to reduce error from nonresponse.

What subject lines and messages in an e-mailed invitation maximize cooperation for a web survey? Answering this question is ever more important as survey researchers increasingly turn to web surveys to reduce costs. We test respondents’ preferences for subject lines and messages in an e-mailed invitation to participate in a Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey. Findings suggest that respondents prefer informative and straightforward subject lines that reference the purpose and the sponsor of the survey. Brief and uninformative subject lines should be avoided. In the body of the e-mail, respondents prefer messages that expand on the study’s purpose and usefulness and extend a guarantee of confidentiality. Messages that encourage participation for the sake of the study’s representativeness or accuracy are unpersuasive to potential respondents. Few differences emerged in preferences among demographic subgroups.

Emergency department (ED) crowding poses a severe public health threat, and identifying acceptable means of treating medical conditions in alternative sites of care is imperative. We compared patients' experiences with in-home urgent care via mobile integrated health (MIH) vs urgent care provided in EDs.Survey, completed on paper, online, or by telephone. We surveyed all patients who received MIH care for an urgent health problem (n = 443) and consecutive patients who visited EDs for urgent care (n = 1436).Study participants were members of a managed care plan who were dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid, 21 years or older, and treated either by MIH or in an ED for nonemergent conditions around Boston, Massachusetts, between February 2017 and June 2018. The survey assessed patients' perceptions of their urgent care experiences.A total of 206 patients treated by community paramedics and 718 patients treated in EDs completed surveys (estimated 66% and 62% response rates, respectively). Patients treated by MIH perceived higher-quality care, more frequently reporting "excellent" (54.7%) or "very good" (32.4%) care compared with ED patients (40.7% and 24.3%, respectively; P .0001), and were significantly more likely to report that decisions made about their care were "definitely right" compared with patients treated in the ED (66.1% vs 55.6%; P = .02).Patients appear satisfied with receiving paramedic-delivered urgent care in their homes rather than EDs, perceiving higher-quality care. This suggests that in-home urgent care via MIH may be acceptable for patients with nonemergent conditions.

Measuring the rate of religious non-affiliation is a difficult task in China, one of the least religious countries in the world, and elsewhere. This study evaluates the trend of religious non-affiliation in China using 22 surveys spanning three decades. We found that two surveys asking beliefs in a mix of gods and religions yielded dramatically lower estimates of non-affiliation compared to the others that measured affiliation explicitly. Among the latter, using a filter question (a yes/no question for religious affiliation) increased the reports of non-affiliation but allowing multiple choices and putting “no religion” toward the end of the lists of response options moderately decreased the reports of non-affiliation. After accounting for question design and demographic differences across the surveys, the decline in religious non-affiliation is reduced and becomes not significant during more recent years.

How do parents pass on who they are—their beliefs and values, norms and habits, and the social groups with which they identify—to their children? This complex process, called socialization, is a route by which parents, family members, friends, and others in the family’s community influence children’s identity development, including the development of their religious identities. This research novelly integrates socialization processes into identity theory, illustrating intergenerational transmission of identity, using the religious identity as an example. The study uses a clustered sample of resident mothers, fathers, and their adolescent children to investigate the connections between parents’ and children’s religious identities. Models estimate the influence of mothers’ and fathers’ religious identity prominence (the affective value parents place on their religious identities) and salience (the likelihood of enacting the religious identity across situations, religious and otherwise) and their behavior in the religious identity on those of their children. Reverse paths from children’s religious identities to those of their parents are also estimated. Findings suggest that mothers’ religious identities have a strong influence on those of their children but the influence of fathers’ religious identities are more limited. Finally, children’s religious identities have limited influence on those of their parents.

Identity theory is concerned with how the self is shaped by social forces. This research examines how the ability to traverse the physical environment shapes the prominence and salience of the religious identity. We propose that relational positioning in terms of the distance between locations where identities are enacted, is a form of intermediate social structure which facilitates and constrains contact with identity-related others. The physical environment impacts the identity process by shaping the composition of one’s daily contacts, for example, someone who has to travel a long way to church will have a less religiously homogenous social circle, which shapes the subsequent identity process. This proposition is examined using data collected from individuals residing in communities which vary in the difficulty of traveling through the physical environment. The results support the inclusion of relational positioning as a form of intermediate social structure in identity theory, opening a potential pathway for connecting research on social inequalities and identity theory.

Objective The objective of this study was to assess nonresponse error in telephone health survey data based on an address-based sample. Data sources Telephone and in-person interviews in Greater Boston. Study design/data collection Interviewers attempted telephone interviews at addresses that were matched to telephone numbers using questions drawn from federal health surveys. In-person household interviews were carried out with telephone nonrespondents and at addresses without matching telephone numbers. Principal findings After adjusting for demographic differences, only eight of 15 estimates based on the telephone interviews lay within two standard errors of the estimates when data from all three groups were included. Conclusions For health surveys of address-based samples, many estimates based on telephone respondents differ from the total population in ways that cannot be corrected with simple demographic adjustments.

This study investigates what role, if any, nonresponse plays in inflating survey estimates of religious behavior, using a multimode survey designed to allow estimation of nonresponse bias. A sample of 3,000 Boston-area households drawn from an address-based frame was randomly divided into two subsamples, contacted by mail, and invited to participate in a survey. The first subsample was asked to complete an interactive voice response interview. The second subsample was asked to complete a survey by telephone if a number was available for the address or by personal interview if not. Finally, random samples of nonrespondents were recontacted for a personal interview. Comparison of attendance estimates from initial interviews with nonrespondent interviews within sample segments yields minor or minimal differences that are not statistically significant. Findings suggest that the mechanism generating survey nonresponse is unlikely to be a major cause of bias in religious service attendance estimates in this study.

Many social identities (e.g., race, ethnicity) are measured using mark-all-that-apply (MATA) questions because they allow survey respondents to account for the multiple, nonexclusive ways in which they identify themselves. We test the use of MATA measures of sexual orientation and gender identity and compare them with forced choice (FC), an alternative format using a series of yes-or-no questions. Respondents, including an oversample of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) individuals, participated in a 2 × 3 factorial survey experiment. For the first factor, we hypothesize that respondents randomly assigned to FC will report a higher count of identities than those assigned to MATA. For the second factor, we hypothesize that increased topic salience will help LGBQ respondents in particular to overcome poor question design. Findings suggest that MATA and FC measure comparably when question writing best practices are followed, but topic salience can yield higher data quality when poorly formatted questions are used.

Survey estimates of the religiously unaffiliated in the United States—between 20% and 25%—make this group one of the largest “religious” categories in the country. Recent research argues that political polarization pushes political liberals and moderates to report no religious affiliation to distance themselves from religious conservatives. One key point of polarization behind this phenomenon is sexuality-focused politics, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) rights and discrimination. The current research uses a split-ballot survey experiment to investigate sexuality-focused political polarization as a cause of the reports of religious nonaffiliation. A sample of 2,238 respondents, stratified by sexual orientation (half LGBQ, half straight), completed a brief web survey starting with two randomly ordered series of questions on religion and sexuality. Findings suggest that sexuality-focused political polarization is not likely to be a primary cause of survey respondents’ claims of religious nonaffiliation.

Declining social capital is one explanation for lower response to household surveys. By intentionally developing an awareness of social capital among its interviewers, the Por Ahí Dicen research study encouraged the use of interviewer social capital as a mechanism to achieve a response rate of 65.2 percent for baseline and post-intervention household studies of Puerto Rican mothers ( n = 413). These surveys were conducted in a “hard-to-count” urban environment designated by the U.S. Census Bureau. The interviewer trainings highlighted three domains of social capital: reciprocity and generalized trust, group or social cohesion, and cultural affirmation. By stressing the importance of social capital as an engagement tool, interviewers more easily made research participation salient and successfully leveraged Puerto Rican mothers’ participation in the community study.

This article examines empirically ideas initially proposed in speculative work by Ervin and Stryker dealing with what could be understood about human social behavior and interaction by bringing together self-esteem and identity theories. Necessary to that task is distinguishing between two key and often conflated concepts of identity theory, salience and prominence. We argue that role-specific self-efficacy, embedded in self-esteem theory, is a precedent and a product of the identity theory model and global self-efficacy is a link from role-identities to the self-concept through the impact of global self-efficacy on prominence. Findings support a hypothesized feedback loop from role-specific self-efficacy to prominence to salience and back to role-specific self-efficacy.

This chapter ties together the preceding chapters, organizing them in terms of shared methodological topics—item and unit nonresponse, measurement and socially desirable responding, and interaction and interactional problems in the survey interview—and highlighting potential areas of future research. A common thread connecting the preceding chapters, inequality and its effect on each of the methodological topics, is traced and discussed. Feelings of powerlessness, marginalization, and stigmatization emerge as important potential causes of item nonresponse, measurement error, and other types of survey errors. As inequality is a primary focus of sociological theory and research, the need for sociological understandings in survey methodology is emphasized. Extensions and additional theories and perspectives that may be fruitfully applied to survey methodological problems are also discussed.

This chapter provides an introduction to the volume. The reader is invited to make connections between survey methodology and sociological theory, broadly defined. Connections between these disciplines extend back for decades, anchored in the strong representation of sociologists among the first generation of survey methodologists. Although they remain neighboring and complementary academic disciplines, the influence of sociological theory has been attenuated in the intervening years as survey methodologists have increasingly turned to cognitive psychological approaches to understand survey errors and artifacts. While this approach has undoubtedly lead to important improvements in survey measurement, social and interactional approaches may also shed useful insights. Thus, this chapter, and those that follow, argue for a revitalized research program linking survey methodology with sociological theory. Sociology’s rich theoretical foundation and extensive body of research has much to offer survey methodology. Moreover, survey methodology offers sociologists the opportunity to learn about human behavior afforded by the investigation of survey errors.

We label questions “sensitive” if their object is potentially threatening, controversial, intrusive, or objectionable. These sorts of questions are those that encourage socially desirable responding, the term used to describe respondents’ propensity to answer in a way that aligns with social norms. Questions about normative behaviors and attitudes are often similarly labeled. But for whom and in which contexts are these questions sensitive? I review theories behind sensitive questions and related concepts, social desirability and impression management, in survey data collection. The limitations of conventional understandings are outlined and a new approach is introduced based in the self-views of the respondent. I argue that conventional understandings that rely on subjective assessments of question sensitivity or respondents’ concern over the interviewer’s impression of them are incomplete and include residual variation that may be explained with an alternative theoretical approach. An identity-based approach rooted in how respondents see themselves vis-a-vis their identities affords a more complete and effective understanding of socially desirable responding than conventional explanations.

This chapter reports the findings of a study comparing the association of religious behavior with two identity-related concepts, testing their potential as a source of survey response bias in the self-reported measure of religious attendance. Religious identity prominence is defined as the value one places on one’s religious identity. Respondents with prominent religious identities interpret the religious attendance question in a way that allows them to report on their self-view as religious people rather than on their religious behavior. Religious authenticity is defined as the desire to be and be seen as who one “really is.” Respondents are motivated to demonstrate their authentic religious selves by reporting that they are the “kind of person” who attends. Results suggest that religious identity prominence, but not religious authenticity, positively influences reports of religious attendance. These findings shed light on the potential sources of error in survey measures of religious attendance and ways we might avoid them in the future.

Time constraints—having more to do than time to do it—can prevent us from doing everything we need and want to do. When lack of time constrains our behavior, the behavior linked to voluntary role identities (like being a member of a softball team or bowling league) may be the first to be cut. Although, as many of these role identities are socially desirable, survey respondents may still claim to have performed them. Thus, this study examines role behavior and its measurement in the face of time constraints. The athlete identity is examined as a potential casualty of the time crunch, used because it is a common, typically voluntary identity that has a relatively standard set of role behaviors (e.g., participating in sporting events, like games or matches, as an athlete). Situational constraints, namely, a lack of time, are brought into a model based on the structure posited in identity theory (Stryker [1980] 2003) to help explain variation between self-reported and actual role behavior. Thus, the c...

Explanations of error in survey self-reports have focused on social desirability: that respondents answer questions about normative behavior to appear prosocial to interviewers. However, this paradigm fails to explain why bias occurs even in self-administered modes like mail and web surveys. We offer an alternative explanation rooted in identity theory that focuses on measurement directiveness as a cause of bias. After completing questions about physical exercise on a web survey, respondents completed a text message–based reporting procedure, sending updates on their major activities for five days. Random assignment was then made to one of two conditions: instructions mentioned the focus of the study, physical exercise, or not. Survey responses, text updates, and records from recreation facilities were compared. Direct measures generated bias—overreporting in survey measures and reactivity in the directive text condition—but the nondirective text condition generated unbiased measures. Findings are discussed in terms of identity.

The nature of religious change and the future of religion have been central questions of social science since its inception. But empirical research on this question has been quite American-centric, encouraged by the conventional wisdom that the United States is an outlier of religiosity in the developed world, and, more pragmatically, by the availability of survey data. The dramatic growth in the number and reach of cross-national surveys over the past two decades has offered a corrective. These data have allowed research on religious trends in the United States, Canada, and Europe, putting American trends into comparative relief. This research synthesis reviews the past quarter century of cross-national comparative survey research on religious behavior, focusing on religious service attendance as a commonly measured behavior that is arguably more equivalent across societies and cultures than other measures of religiosity. The lack of evidence for religious revival is highlighted, noting instead declining rates of attendance in the United States and Canada, and either declining rates or low "bottomed-out" stability in Western Europe, most of Eastern Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. Finally, countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia are discussed to the extent that research allows, before a call for future research-in these places in particular-is made in order to correct for the Western and Christian focus of much of the research on cross-national religious trends.

That rates of normative behaviors produced by sample surveys are higher than actual behavior warrants is well evidenced in the research literature. Less well understood is the source of this error. Twenty-five cognitive interviews were conducted to probe responses to a set of common, conventional survey questions about one such normative behavior: religious service attendance. Answers to the survey questions and cognitive probes are compared both quantitatively and qualitatively. Half of the respondents amended their answer during cognitive probing, all amendments indicating a lower rate of attendance than originally reported, yielding a statistically significant reduction in reported attendance. Narrative responses shed light onto the source of bias, as respondents pragmatically interpreted the survey question to allow themselves to include other types of religious behavior, to report on a more religious past, and discount current constraints on their religious behavior, in order to report aspirational or normative religious identities.

This article investigates the effect of the Boston Marathon Bombing on city residents— how the tragic incident changed, or did not change, how Bostonians live in and feel about their community and neighborhoods. Unlike prior research that began weeks or months after a terrorist attack and used retrospective reports, this study spans the focal event. An address-based sample of residents from three neighborhoods, distinct in racial and economic makeup was surveyed by mail using a three-contact protocol. About two-thirds of respondents answered a survey of neighborhood sentiments, and health and well-being in the days before the bombing (N = 581) and slightly over a third answered the survey after the bombing (N = 313). Assessments of safety, city and neighborhood satisfaction and solidarity, mental health, and other key measures vary greatly between the three neighborhoods, which are diverse in racial and economic composition, but also vary in proximity to the bomb site. Net of neighborhood differences, the bombing had a strong negative effect on neighborhood cohesion and reduced use of public transit. Strong interactions are also found between timing of survey completion (pre and post bombing) and neighborhood for assessments of neighborhood solidarity.

Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging is a ubiquitous technology available on the vast majority of cellphones in use in 2013. It provides a common technological denominator between mobile devices of nearly every make and model, supplying researchers an avenue to collect data without the expense and difficulty of designing specific applications for every cellphone or device on the market. SMS/text messaging was used as a method of data collection using a sample of students from a large, Midwestern university. The procedure adapted conventional time use measurement procedures to fit the device, the sample, and the behavior of interest. After answering questions on a brief Web survey, respondents were asked to text researchers for five days, updating major changes in their activities. Following data collection, data from the text condition was compared to that from a conventional (Web) survey and data from a reverse record check from campus recreation facilities to validate reports of the behavior of interest – physical exercise and activity. Findings suggest that respondents provided consistently high quality data on self-reports of the behaviors of interest. Moreover, paradata measures of text data quality (e.g., number of text messages sent, number of days with messages) predict data quality on the behavior of interest.

Survey findings suggest that predominantly Muslim countries are among the most religious in the world and validate commonly held, but overly simplistic, perceptions of Muslims as extremely and uniformly religious. Existing research has demonstrated that survey estimates can give a distorted view of the reality of levels of religious practice; however, it has thus far focused exclusively on traditionally Christian, advanced Western democracies. To address this oversight, the veracity of self-reported religious practice in the Muslim world is tested using Pakistan, the Palestinian territories, and Turkey as cases for study. Comparing estimates of prayer from conventional surveys with those from time diaries, marginal rates of overreporting are estimated for each country by sex. The time-use measure of prayer is then imputed for the conventional survey data set to estimate overreporting at the respondent level and to predict overreporting using a measure of religious identity importance. Findings suggest that overreporting of prayer occurs in each country considered, although more consistently for women than for men. Moreover, religious identity importance is strongly correlated with overreporting of prayer, suggesting that a similar mechanism may promote the measurement error for overreported prayer in the Muslim world and overreported church attendance in the West.

Like that of other normative behaviors, much of the research on physical exercise is based on self-reports that are prone to overreporting. While research has focused on identifying the presence and degree of overreporting, this paper fills an important gap by investigating its causes. The explanation based in impression management will be challenged, using an explanation based in identity theory as an arguably better fitting alternative. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: (1) a web instrument using direct survey questions, or (2) a chronological reporting procedure using text messaging. Comparisons to validation data from a reverse record check indicate significantly greater rates of overreporting in the web condition than in the text condition. Results suggest that measurement bias is associated with the importance of the respondents’ exercise identity, prompted by the directness of the conventional survey question. Findings call into question the benefit of self-administration for bias reduction in measurement of normative behaviors.

Identity theory invokes two distinct but related concepts, identity salience and prominence, to explain how the organization of identities that make up the self impacts the probability that a given identity is situationally enacted. However, much extant research has failed to clearly distinguish between salience and prominence, and their empirical relationship has not been adequately investigated, impeding a solid understanding of the significance and role of each in a general theory of the self. This study examines their causal ordering using three waves of panel data from 48 universities focusing on respondents’ identities as science students. Analyses strongly support a causal ordering from prominence to salience. We provide theoretical and empirical grounds to justify this ordering while acknowledging potential variation in its strength across identities. Finally, we offer recommendations about the use of prominence and salience when measures of one or both are available or when analyses use cross-sectional data.

This paper proposes an explanation of the overreporting of voting participation based in Stryker's identity theory (1980) , integrating the social pressure approach of Bernstein, Chadha, and Montjoy (2001) . A set of logistic regression models is estimated to predict the propensity to overreport using indicators of extensive and intensive commitments to a political identity. Models are tested using vote verification data from five years of the American National Election Studies (1978, 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1990). Identity commitments are strongly predictive of overreporting and conventional understandings of social desirability fail to predict overreporting. Findings suggest that a conceptualization of self-reported voting as a measure of identity may provide a better explanation for why respondents overreport their voting in terms of extensive and intensive commitments to a political identity.

The difference between religious service attendance measured using conventional surveys and time diaries has been attributed to identity processes; a high level of religious identity importance may prompt overreporting on a survey question. This article tests the hypothesized role of identity importance as an individual determinant of overreporting and the result of socially desirable behavior. A time diary measure of attendance (from the American Time Use Study 2003-2008) is imputed for conventional survey data (from the General Social Survey 2002-2008) using the multiple imputation for multiple studies procedure (Gelman, King, and Liu 1998a). Logistic regression models predicting self-reported attendance and overreported attendance are estimated using identity importance as a key covariate and controlling for demographic variables associated with attendance. Identity importance is a strong predictor of both self-reported and overreported attendance. Attendance, while a biased measure of actual behavior, may be a good indicator of religiosity.

This article applies Stryker's identity theory ([1980] 2003) to the survey interview to examine the bias in self-reports of socially desirable behavior, using religious service attendance as an example case. An extended model, one that includes a novel intrapersonal level of commitment as an influence on identity importance, which, along with intensive and extensive interpersonal commitments, is posited to influence identity salience. The model is fitted to data from the 1998 General Social Survey (Davis and Smith). Findings suggest that the survey interview may be viewed by the respondent as an opportunity to exhibit a socially desirable identity by claiming more frequent or more recent behavior, regardless of the level of inter- or intrapersonal commitments. A path for this systematic error is discussed through the respondent's level of identity importance. Venues for future work are addressed.

The initiative to increase the number of students in STEM disciplines and train them for a science-related job is a current national focus. Using longitudinal panel data from a national study that followed underrepresented college students in STEM fields, we investigate the neglected role that social psychological processes play in influencing science activity among the young. We study the impact of identity processes related to being a science student on entering a science occupation. More broadly, we examine whether an identity formulated in one institutional setting (education) has effects that persist to another institutional setting (the economy). We find that the science identity positively impacts the likelihood of entering a science occupation. It also serves as a mediator for other factors that are related to educational success. This provides insight into how an identity can guide behavior to move persons into structural positions across institutional domains.

Survey methodology is a relatively new academic discipline focused on understanding sources of survey errors. As an interdisciplinary field, survey methodology borrows theoretical approaches from other disciplines and applies them to understand how survey respondents answer questions. One field in particular, cognitive psychology, has played a central role in the development of survey methodology. The cognitive approach has focused researchers' attentions on the sources of error at each stage of the cognitive process respondents use to answer a survey question: comprehension of the question, recollection of relevant information, estimation and judgment, and reporting an answer. Although this focus on the cognitive response process has been positive and fruitful, potentially strong social and interactional influences on the response process have been underinvestigated and undertheorized. Thus, this essay argues for a revitalized research program in the sociological social psychology of survey methodology, given its rich body of theory and research. The current strengths of social psychological and interactional approaches are highlighted, focusing primarily on recent work using identity theory to understand social desirability biases. Finally, potentially fruitful future directions for research are proposed, matching sociological social psychological theories to the survey errors upon which they may shed light.