A decision theoretical analysis of decisions of the Dutch government in exile during World War II

Das Papier beschreibt eine entscheidungstheoretische Analyse von Entscheidungen der niederländischen Exilregierung in London in den Jahren 1940 und 1941 in bezug auf die Verlegung des Regierungssitzes nach Holländisch-Ostindien. Zusammen mit einem von den Autoren entwickelten textanalytischen Verfahren, führt der entscheidungstheoretische Ansatz zu sehr nützlichen Einsichten in die entsprechenden Dokumente: Der Entscheidungsprozeß und das Muster der Einflußnahme verschiedener Regierungsberater konnten entdeckt werden. Die Entscheidungsgrundlagen, die die Wahl der verschiedenen Alternativen begründeten, konnten vollständig vorausgesagt werden, wobei dies auf der Qualität der Wert- und Wahrscheinlichkeitsaussagen basierte. (KW)'This paper describes a decision theoretical analysis of decisions of the Dutch government in exile in London in 1940/41 with respect to the transference of the seat of the government to the Dutch East-Indies. Combined with a text-analysis procedure developed by the authors, the decision theoretical approach to the related documents produced very useful insights: the decision process and the influence-pattern of the different governmental advisers could be detected and the decision rules which explain the choices could be perfectly predicted, based on the quality of the value- and probability statements.' (author's abstract

Formulierung und Klassifikation von Fragen

"Häufig untersucht man, welchen Einfluss die Formulierung von Fragen auf Antworten hat, während das Problem der Übersetzung von Begriffen in Fragen kaum erörtert wird. In dieser Studie wollen wir uns mit der Übertragung von Konstrukten in Fragen befassen. Durch die Operationalisierung von Konstrukten kann angegeben werden, auf welche intuitiven Begriffe sie sich beziehen. Danach kann anhand der intuitiven Begriffe festgestellt werden, welche Fragen in Betracht kommen. Intuitive Begriffe beziehen sich auf kognitive Überzeugungen, Evaluationen, evaluative Überzeugungen, affektive Bewertungen, Präferenzen, Werte, Normen, Verhalten, Handhungstendenzen und dergleichen. Um den Zusammenhang zwischen den intuitiven Konzepten und ihrer sprachlichen Formulierung in den Items zu verdeutlichen, werden die Strukturen von Behauptungen analysiert. Wenn man die Begriffe mit der Frageform verknüpft, erhält man ein Verfahren zur systematischen Klassifizierung von Fragen, das sich auch eignet, um Fehler in Fragen zu entdecken, wodurch man eine erhebliche Verbesserung der Qualität der Fragen erzielen kann." (Autorenreferat)"A great deal has been written about the effects of the wording of survey questions on the responses. On the other hand, relatively little attention has been given to the content of the questions or the translation of theoretical concepts into corresponding questions for survey research. In this paper we concentrate on the links between a set of basic concepts for social science research and questions which can be formulated in order to measure these concepts. The basic concepts we will discuss are: cognitions, evaluations, evaluative beliefs, feelings, preferences, rights, norms, policies, behavior, action tendencies, expectations and a number of demographic characteristics. In order to clarify the link between the concepts and their verbal expression (assertions), we analyze the structures of sentences expressing the different concepts. We also look at the specific types of questions which can be asked about such concepts and discusses their meaning. The combination of the classifications of concepts and questions provides a procedure that allows us to formulate and classify questions in a systematic fashion." (author's abstract

The results of the MTMM experiments in round 2

Working paper number 23 of the series of the Research and Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology (RECSM)

Arguments of physicists concerning the use of the first atomic bomb

The decisions that politicians have to make with respect to foreign policy are in general very complex because the possible strategies have multiple uncertain consequences. For such complex problems the mathematical decision theory has developed procedures to arrive at optimal decisions. Accordingly, the politicians formulate the decision problems in terms of possible strategies and possible consequences with their probabilities and utilities, but they don´t have the numeric information and the calculation facilities to use the suggested optimal “Subjective Expected Utility model” to derive conclusions. Therefore we have studied in a long term project the decision rules the politicians use to derive their choices. We have suggested 7 decision rules which are specific for the description of the decision problem with respect to the use or not of the rank ordering of utilities and/or probabilities. It turns out that these 7 decision rules are sufficient to near perfectly predict the choices in 231 observed decision situations. To check whether the argumentation is similar with respect to crucial decisions i.e. going to war or not, we studied arguments of decision makers concerning the start of the First and Second World War, the Cuba missile crisis and recently the use of the atomic bomb in 1945. In most of these situations one of the decision rules specific to the form of description of the observed decision problem predicts the chosen action. Surprised by the limited us of evaluations of utilities by the politicians we decided to study the arguments of scientists concerning the use of the atomic bomb against Japan or not. We were wondering whether they would use the same procedure for argumentation and possibly use more elaborated arguments. The result of this study was that they use the same procedures for argumentation but they use more frequently arguments involving evaluations of utilities but this was more determined by the situation than by a different way of argumentation

Estimation of the effects of measurement characteristics on the quality of survey questions

"When designing questionnaires, many choices have to be made. Because the consequences of these choices for the quality of the questions are largely unknown, it has often been said that designing a questionnaire is an art. To make it a more scientific activity we need to know more about the consequences of these choices. In order to further such an approach we have: 1. made an inventory of the choices to be made when designing survey questions and created a code book to transform these question characteristics into the independent variables for explaining quality of survey questions; 2. assembled a large set of studies that use multi-trait multi-method experiments to estimate the reliability and validity of questions; 3. carried out a meta-analysis that relates these question characteristics to the reliability and validity estimates of the questions. On the basis of the results of these efforts the authors have constructed a database. This data base contains at present 1023 measurement instruments based on 87 experiments conducted on random samples from sometimes regional but mostly national samples of 300 to 2000 respondents. The database contains information on studies of reliability and validity of survey questions formulated in three different languages: English, German and Dutch. The purpose of this study was to generate cross national generalizations of the findings published so far drawn from national studies. This analysis provides a quantitative estimate of the effects of the different choices on the reliability, validity and the method effects." (author's abstract

The development of the program SQP 2.0 for the prediction of the quality of survey questions

Working paper number 24 of the series of the Research and Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology (RECSM)