WLS Codebooks

Note: Codebooks contain frequency data from the private data release. For some variables, these differ from the frequencies in the public release. Variables that differ between the public and private versions include "(not available on public release)" as part of the variable description, or a note indicating the difference between the public and private versions.

Mail: World Health Survey Vignettes

Sibling Mail: World Health Survey Vignettes


OVERVIEW

In the final design, each respondent received two questions about each of two
vignettes (out of four total) for the mobility and affect domains, as well as
the appropriate matching self-assessment items.  Because we are doubling the
items per domain, this still adds up to 12 items on the mail questionnaire,
which is what we had planned before when we had three domains.  Adding a third
domain would add six more questions, which given the tight space of the mail
survey is itself no small issue, but there also was not a third domain whose
vignettes and self-assessment items we feel fully comfortable with using.

We did not intersperse vignettes with self-assessment items, but otherwise we
think there is a reason to believe that proximity between the two would be
advantageous since the introduction to the vignettes asks respondents to
evaluate the vignettes in the same way as the self-assessment items.

We replicated the wording of the second, third, and fourth vignettes in the WHS
implementation.  As per a discussion using the vignette listserv, we are not
using the first and fifth vignettes because we do not expect that they would
yield meaningful variation in our sample.  We did, however, add another
vignette in each domain.  We used four vignettes in each domain, with two
vignettes from each domain included in each form.

We created four forms.  Because these forms were administered by 1/10th random
replicate to save money, we could not have a 25% administration of each form.
Instead, Forms B and D were each administered to 3 replicates (30% of the
sample each) and Forms A and C were each administered to 2 replicates (20%).
Given our rotational scheme, however, each of the four vignettes for both
domains appeared on 50% of the surveys in all.  The rotational and replicate
scheme is presented below.

Because we planned on having separate forms for men and women, we used same-
sex names in all vignettes.  The names were rotated and used the four most
common names among WLS respondents (as an aside, this will allow us to see if
there are any "superstition" effects when the person in the vignette has the
same first name as the respondent).  The planned rotation of domains,
vignettes, and names for five forms of the instrument is included below.

For the mobility domain, the added vignette is Vignette D below.  For the
affect domain, the added vignette is a modified version of the "Eva" vignette
on Gary King's website (Vignette B below).  We modified that vignette to say
that [name] worries "often" about his health instead of "all the time" because
we were not confident that Vignette B (below) would read as less anxious and
worried than Vignette C otherwise.  (Just from reading them, we are also uneasy
about whether Vignette B and C for mobility will have a clear difference in
ordering among respondents, but we assume that the WHS pretesting has shown
these to be consistently ordered or else they would not have been selected for
that survey.)

[See memo145 for additional information.]


BRIEF VARIABLE DESCRIPTIONS

    DX3001RE-DX3004RE:      Personal Mobility/Affect during the Past Month.
  
    DXMA1RER-DXMA3RER:      Mobility A Vignette
  
    DXMB1RER-DXMB3RER:      Mobility B Vignette

    DXMC1RER-DXMC3RER:      Mobility C Vignette

    DXMD1RER-DXMD3RER:      Mobility D Vignette

    DXAA1RER-DXAA3RER:      Affect A Vignette
  
    DXAB1RER-DXAB3RER:      Affect B Vignette
  
    DXAC1RER-DXAC3RER:      Affect C Vignette
  
    DXAD1RER-DXAD3RER:      Affect D Vignette

NOTE: See Cor813 in Appendix A for variable creation details

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