Willem Saris

Biography

Willem E. Saris was born in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1943. He finished his study of Sociology at the Utrecht University in 1968 and got his PhD degree from the University of Amsterdam in 1979. He became full professor in political science, especially the methodology of the social sciences in 1983. Till 2001, he was working at the University of Amsterdam. In 1984, he created the Sociometric Research Foundation in order to improve social science research by the application of statistics. In 1998, he became member of the methodology group that prepared the start of the European Social Survey (ESS). As a consequence he was also member of the Central Coordinating Team of the ESS from 2000 till 2012.

In 2001, he moved to Barcelona where he got a position as ICREA professor at ESADE. He was also from 2009 to 2012 director of the Research and Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology (RECSM) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He was also one of the founders and the first chairman of the European Survey Research Association (ESRA) which turned out a big success.

Saris advised about 25 doctoral students. Among them were Nelly Kalfs (1993), Annette Scherpenzeel (1995), Jack Menke (1996), Gilbert Cijntje (1997), Akos Munnich (1998), Emiel Kaper (1999), Jaap Kamps (2000), Ivar Vermeulen (2002), Robert Voogt (2004), William van der Veld (2006) all at the University of Amsterdam, Christiana Martini (2003) at the University of Padua, Alberto Gimeno and Antoni Dorse (2005), Laura Guillén Ramo (2007), all at ESADE, Barcelona, Daniel Oberski, Tilburg University (2011), and Mélanie Révilla (2012), Wiebke Weber (2013), Paolo Moncagatta (2015), André Pirralha (2016), and Diana Zavala-Rojas (2016) at Pompeu Fabra University.

Study of political decision making

Over a long period of years Saris was involved with Irmtraud Gallhofer in an applied research project studying political decision making on the basis of minutes of the government or notes of advisors to the government. After developing reliable instruments for analysis, they applied their approach on many different decisions of the Dutch government and mayor decisions in the world history such as decisions concerning the start of the First and Second World War, the Cuba missiles crisis and the use of the atomic bombs in 1945. This study was first of all directed on the argumentation of individual decision makers. In a later phase, the research was extended to the study of collective decision making by the same governmental groups. The striking result was that the decision makers were making so simple arguments with respect to such serious problems of war and peace.

Statistical aspects of structural equation models (SEM)

Worried about the testing procedures of structural equation modelling, he worked together with Albert Satorra for years to improve these procedures. They have developed different procedures to evaluate structural equation models. The final product was a procedure for detecting misspecification in these models taking into account the power of the tests. A program (JRule) was developed for these tests by William van der Veld.

Studies concerning the improvement of measurement in survey research

Application of SEM showed how large the errors were in survey data. Therefore, he directed his research on procedures to improve the measurement instrument such as the application of continuous response scales instead of category scales. In doing so, he detected that people could provide responses in very precise but different ways. This variation in response functions would be perceived as measurement error if it was not detected. In order to prevent this problem he suggested to use two fixed reference points on a scales points where there could be no doubt what they meant. Also studies were undertaken to improve measurement by use of computer assisted data collection, especially in order to remove the effect of the interviewer in the data collection. The latter research led to the development in 1986 of the Telepanel a procedure comparable with the Web survey procedure but at a time before the web existed. Given the well known fact that most people do not know much about many problems discussed and inspired by the decision theoretical approach discussed in a previous project a research line was developed to develop a decision aid for people to participate in decision making with respect to complex issues. In this context a decision aid, the Choice questionnaire, was developen by him in cooperation with Peter Neijens and Jan de Ridder. In this procedure the respondents had to evaluate necessary information about the issue before they were asked to make their choice. Because of the lack of validity of the proposals for measurement instruments specified even by experts in the different fields, he created together with Irmtraud Gallhofer the three steps procedure for designing survey questions. The suggestion is that use of this procedure guarantees the validity of the proposed questions

Studies related to the evaluation of survey measurement instruments with respect to reliability and validity

When he realized that one could indeed improve survey measures but one could never reduce the errors to zero, he decided to change his research in the direction of estimating the size of the systematic and random errors in the measures in order to be able to correct for measurement error. Inspired by the work of Frank Andrews (1984) a research program has been developed in cooperation with 11 different research groups in Europe from different countries. First the approach to evaluate measurement instruments, the so-called Multitrait-Multimethod (MTMM) experiment has been evaluated and a new model for MTMM data was developed in cooperation with Frank Adrews. This so-called True Score model allows for the separation of random and systematic errors. Also a new design, The Split-ballot MTMM design, for MTMM experiments was developed in order to reduce the number of repetitions of the same questions in cooperation with Albert Satorra and Germa Coenders. Next, data have been collected with this design within the telepanel and the ESS and the data were analysed by members of his research group in RECSM to determine the reliability (complement of random errors) and validity (complement of systematic errors) of measures.

The development of a procedure to predict the quality of survey questions

Probably the most important development in his research took place when he realized that one could never study the reliability and validity of all questions. This would be too expensive and time consuming. The alternative he suggested was to develop a coding system for characteristics of the questions and do a meta analysis trying to predict, on the basis of the coded characteristics of the questions, the reliability and validity of these questions. If these predictions were good enough the prediction procedure could also be used for other questions that were not studied so far but of which the same characteristics were coded. It turned out that the prediction of the quality of question, determined in the MTMM experiments, on the basis of the characteristics of the questions, was quite good. This led him to the idea to design a computer assisted expert system which uses all available information of data quality to predict the quality of new questions. This program, called Survey Quality Predictor or SQP was first developed by him in MS-DOS and later transformed in a Windows version. At present there is a new version (SQP 2.0) made by Daniel Oberski based on 3700 questions evaluated in MTMM experiments (SQP). Users can add their own questions in the data base and receive evaluations of the quality of the questions with respect to reliability and validity. Users get also information about possible improvements of the questions. The importance of this program is that the evaluation is not limited to the questions that have been evaluated but can be used for any questions for which the characterics are coded in the system. All these questions and quality predictions are available to all users free of charge. In this way the knowledge base of questions and quality predictions is growing day by day. Momentarily the program contains already 67.000 questions introduced by more than 2000 unique users of the program.

Awards

As a member of the CCT of the European Social Survey he became laureate of the Descartes Prize 2005, for the best collaborative research. In 2009, he received the Helen Dinerman award by the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) in recognition for his lifelong contributions to the methodology of public opinion research. In 2011, he received a doctor honoris cause of the University of Debrecen (Hungary). In 2013, he received the important service to survey research prize of the ESRA. In 2014, he was awarded together with Daniel Oberski by the American Association for Public Opinion Research with the Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award for the Survey Quality Predictor (SQP 2.0) and his contribution to the improving questionnaire design.

Notable contributions

Most relevant publications

Saris has authored and coauthered numerous publications. Some of his main relevant publications are listed below, by main topics. Books