Using Electricity in Iowa Farm Homes

When you pay your regular electric bill, have you ever wondered how much of the total energy used should be charged against the home or individual home appliances- ranges, water heater, freezer? If so, the information in this article may be helpful in making estimates for your home

Cutting Operating Costs for Automatic Stock Waterers

Results of tests on the amounts of electrical energy needed to keep water ice-free in automatic stock waterers furnish some tips on how to keep operating costs down whether your waterer uses electricity or some other fuel

Reducing non-response in longitudinal surveys by improving survey practice

My thesis is about the prevention of unit non-response in longitudinal surveys. Non-response can lead to error in survey estimates, meaning they give a biased picture of the true value in the population. The main sources of non-response in surveys are non-contact and refusal. For longitudinal surveys, which follow the same people over time, non-location is an additional source of non-response. Non-response over time in a longitudinal survey is often referred to as attrition. There are two broad approaches to dealing with non-response in surveys. The first is to make statistical corrections to the survey estimates to take account of non-response error. The second is to try to prevent non-response by improving how surveys are designed and conducted. My research takes a prevention approach, and addresses all three of the major components of non-response in longitudinal surveys. I use randomised experiments to evaluate fieldwork interventions designed to reduce non-response and prior wave data to evaluate the impact of fieldwork interventions on non-response bias. I use data from large-scale, high quality datasets: the UK Millennium Cohort Study and the Innovation Panel of Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study. My main findings are: refusal conversion can be an effective way of reducing non-response both in the immediate and longer term and can lead to some modest reductions in non-response bias; improving the design of the covering letter used on between-wave mailings can improve return rates from sample members with lower levels of education and those who speak languages other than English at home; respondent characteristics are related to the success of both office and field tracking; sample members who respond to an invitation to make their own interview appointment require less fieldwork effort overall and they are more likely to do this when a financial incentive is offered

Evaluating the immediate and longer term impact of a refusal conversion strategy in a large scale longitudinal study

Refusal conversion is one of the fieldwork strategies commonly used to minimise non-response in surveys. There is, however, relatively little evidence about the effectiveness of this strategy, particularly for face-to-face longitudinal surveys. Moreover, much of the existing evidence is based on observational studies. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a fieldwork strategy – intensive re-issuing - to convert refusals using evidence from an intervention on a random sub-sample of refusals implemented in wave four of a large scale longitudinal study in the UK: the Millennium Cohort Study. We show that intensive re-issuing is an effective way of reducing the refusal rate. We also show that refusal conversion led to a modest reduction in non-response bias in the survey estimates for several key variables. The longer term impact of refusal conversion is also a key concern in longitudinal surveys. We demonstrate that, although the majority of converted refusals go on to participate in the subsequent wave of the study, there is no overall effect of intensive re-issuing on sample size at this wave

Effect of drive row ground covers on hop (Rosales: Cannabaceae) yard arthropod pests in Vermont, USA

Alternatives to pesticides are necessary for the management of hop (Humulus lupulus L.) arthropod pests. The three major arthropod pests in northeastern US hop production include two-spotted spider mite, Tetranychus urticae Koch, hop aphid Phorodon humuli (Schrank), and potato leafhopper, Empoasca fabae Harris. This 3-yr study (2012-2014) in Vermont investigated the effect of flowering ground covers on arthropod pest abundance. Hop cultivars \u27Nugget\u27 and \u27Cascade\u27 were evaluated under a strip-split plot experimental design. Ground cover treatments included 1) Control: mowed red clover (Trifolium pratense) and resident weeds, 2) Clover: red clover, and 3) Diverse: common yarrow (Achillea millefolium), beebalm (Monarda fistulosa), red clover, and annual sunflower (Helianthus annuus). Natural enemies were grouped by associated pest and indicated by our mixed model to be strong predictors of the number of hop aphid and potato leafhopper on hop plants. In year two, ground cover treatment had a significant effect on two-spotted spider mite abundance where fewer two-spotted spider mite were observed on hop plants in Diverse plots. The established, un-mowed Clover treatment was preferred by potato leafhopper over Diverse ground cover and hop plants. This revealed the potential for clover ground cover to serve as a trap crop for potato leafhopper management in northeastern hop yards. Our findings are evidence that ground covers implemented for conservation biological control may serve more specific pest management functions instead of or in addition to boosting top-down pest pressure

How Teaching Online Impacts Safety and Comfort: Experiences of Students and Instructors in the Context of Learning Counseling Skills Online

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the necessity for many services to transition from in-person to online, including teaching in higher education and continuing education venues. This shift raised important pedagogical questions that have not yet been explored in the scholarship of teaching and learning literature. This study explored the experiences of students and instructors participating in a synchronous online four-day training workshop on counseling skills relating to supporting individuals who experience life stress and trauma. While many of the findings were consistent with what is already in the e-learning literature, new insights about safety and comfort emerged that have important implications for online delivery when teaching counseling skills and other topics involving potentially complex and emotional content. Recommendations for online teaching and future research are made

Collecting multiple data linkage consents in a mixed mode survey: evidence and lessons learnt from next steps

Linking survey responses with administrative data is a promising practice to increase the range of research questions to be explored, at a limited interview burden, both for respondents and interviewers. This paper describes the protocol for asking consent to data linkage on nine different sources in a large-scale nationally representative survey of young adults in England: the Next Steps Age 25 Survey. Evidence from preparatory qualitative research, piloting and from the main stage of the study is presented. This research constitutes a novel contribution to the literature, discussing the practicalities of implementing a data linkage protocol asking consent both retrospectively and prospectively, on multiple domains, and in the context of a mixed-mode survey

Collecting biomedical and social data in a longitudinal survey: A comparison of two approaches

The inclusion of the collection of biomeasures within social surveys, and longitudinal surveys in particular, is becoming ever more common. Combining objective measurements of health with detailed information about lifestyles and behaviour collected over long periods of time offers enormous research potential. Studies that combine an interview with the collection of biomeasures can be conducted in various ways. One model is that field interviewers make initial contact with participants, conduct the interviews and arrange follow-up visits for a nurse to collect the biomeasures. Alternatively, field interviewers can be trained to collect biomeasures, but there remain questions about whether the quality of data collected is comparable to that collected by a nurse. Other studies invite participants to visit clinics, but this can be very costly in a large-scale national study. There is no consensus on the optimal strategy for combining a social survey with the collection of biomeasures. The 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) is a longitudinal birth cohort study which began in 1970. The 11th sweep of the study began in 2016, when study members were aged 46, and included an interview component alongside the collection of a range of biomeasures. The first phase of fieldwork was conducted using a new approach where nurses conducted all of the data collection. Midway through fieldwork BCS70 switched to a two-stage approach where interviews were conducted by interviewers followed by a separate nurse visit. This presented a unique opportunity to evaluate the success of the two approaches

Measurement Equivalence in Sequential Mixed-Mode Surveys

Many surveys collect data using a mixture of modes administered in sequential order. Although the impacts of mixed-mode designs on measurement quality have been extensively studied, their impacts on the measurement quality of unobservable (or latent) constructs is still an understudied area of research. In particular, it is unclear whether latent constructs derived from multi-item scales are measured equivalently across different sequentially-administered modes—an assumption that is often made by analysts, but rarely tested in practice. In this study, we assess the measurement equivalence of several commonly-used multi-item scales collected in a sequential mixed-mode (Web-telephone-face-to-face) survey: the Age 25 wave of the Next Steps cohort study. After controlling for selection via an extensive data-driven weighting procedure, a multi-group confirmatory factor analysis was performed to assess measurement equivalence across the three modes. We show that cross-mode measurement equivalence is achieved for nearly all scales, with partial equivalence established for the remaining. Although measurement equivalence was achieved, some differences in the latent means were observed between the modes, particularly between the interviewer-administered and selfadministered modes. We conclude with a discussion of these findings, their potential causes, and implications for survey practice