Moderators of Panel Conditioning in Sensitive Questions. A Meta-Analysis

Relevance & Research Question: Panel Conditioning is a learning effect, that can endanger the validity of results from panel studies. It describes actual changes in attitudes or behaviors or the way they are reported due to participation in former survey waves. Panel conditioning effects are heterogeneous and can manifest in different ways. For example, experience in survey participation may lead to more frequent negative answering of filter questions to reduce response burden. Other possible effects are changes in knowledge or reduction of social desirable answering. As these effects are too diverse to determine one overall effect, moderator and subgroup analyses are necessary for investigation. Corresponding moderating influences such as the design and timing of the surveys or the year of data collection are examined, too. Methods & Data: To be included in the meta-analysis, articles had to report (quasi-)experiments, involving a control group of fresh respondents or actuary information from a registry and at least one group of conditioned respondents. Both groups had to be exposed to identical survey questions to enable between-group comparisons of quantitative outcomes. 44 reports met these criteria. Within the 25 reports coded up to now, 115 single studies were defined. These studies contain 346 effect sizes in total. The effect sizes are nested within the studies and to account for this dependency, three-level mixed-effects models will be used. Results: First analyses showed, that panel conditioning effects are more pronounced for knowledge questions than for other types of questions. Further moderating effects were weak and mostly not significant in the current data set, which will be extended soon. Added Value: The differentiation of different types of conditioning enables conclusions concerning the effects of PC on data quality. Moreover, recommendations on the timing and design of panel surveys, as well as an appropriate operationalization of repeated items are the aim of the meta-analysis.