Self respondents, on the other hand, are more likely to use direct retrieval just
to recall the information necessary to answer the question.
So the answer's more likely to be based on actual events than general knowledge.
And whether one is answering about oneself or
a different household member is likely to affect the motivation to work hard in
providing the most accurate answer possible.
Proxy reporters may be less motivated
because they're not answering about themselves and it may be harder.
They have to use these estimation processes rather than just
directly retrieving information.
Proxies may be less subject to social desirability issues, so
let's say smoking is stigmatized for one household member.
If that person answers a Let say himself, are you smoking?
Or how many cigarettes have you smoked this week?
There might be a tendency to shade the truth to present
one self in a better light.
But if someone if asked, is your husband smoking or
how many cigarettes did your husband smoked last week?
That may not be as stigmatized or embarrassing for
the spouse answering about the husband.
And so, the answer actually may be more truthful from
a proxy when the topics are socially undesirable.
The accuracy of the proxy reports is likely to be affected by the amount
of communication between the selected or target respondent.
And the proxy, so, family members probably know more about each other,
and therefore proxies answering about family members probably likely
to be more accurate than, say.
Roommates or other kinds of living arrangements where
the people are not as well connected and
the level of communication is not as great as it is among family members.
A review paper by Jeffrey Moore in the 1980s
investigated the really assumption that self respondents, respondents
answering about themselves, provide better quality data than proxy respondents.
And he actually found very little evidence for this in his review of the literature.
He did point out that the literature then was really quite
flawed because number of the studies comparing quality of
answered between proxies and self respondents were observational.
They weren't experimentally, they weren't experiments so the respondents
were not randomly assigned to be self-respondents or proxy respondents.
Which is really what you'd need to evaluate the quality of the data from
the proxies.
Instead, what he observed was that what appears to be a difference in quality
may be a difference in fact, so ideally, the contacted household member.
in a methodological study would be randomly assigned to be a self or
proxy reporter.
But in practice, this can never be the case because proxies are used
when the selected respondent is not available.
And so most of the studies that more was revealing, were of this type,
they were observational studies, that is, they weren't conducted as experiments.
The finding that he focused on came from health studies,
in which proxies were shown to report fewer health events that is for
example going to the doctor or the emergency room.
For the household member they're reporting about or
that person is that person is not available.
Then they are to report about themselves and the idea was well the assumption had
been this indicates the proxies are not at giving us complete in thorough answers
about the unavailable but, it selected respondent as they are about themselves.
But, more observe that well, actually
if the selected respondent is not available they're not home.
A person who is available and can serve as a proxy is home.
And someone who's home is more likely to be home for
health reasons and be not as healthy as the person who's not available,
who's not at home, who may well be at work.
And so, while it appears that proxies may be say not giving a complete or
a thorough answers for the intended respondent as they can for themselves.
This is not necessarily the case it could just be that there are real differences
between the health proxies and the health of the people they're reporting about.