Abstract
Government records are often used as benchmarks or gold-standard metrics against which survey data are evaluated. At the individual level, these official records may provide researchers with the opportunity to validate self-reports or augment survey measures with additional data. However, in order to accomplish this, it is first necessary to link the survey respondent and their data to their official government records and this is rarely a straightforward task. This chapter outlines several of the challenges faced by researchers seeking to link survey data to government records and overviews some of the methods that have been demonstrated to be effective at making these links. The chapter also proposes areas for future research that will make matching easier and more effective.
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Sakshaug, J.W. (2018). Methods of Linking Survey Data to Official Records. In: Vannette, D., Krosnick, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Survey Research . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54395-6_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54395-6_32
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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