Dr Ana Villar

Research Fellow, Centre for Comparative Social Surveys

Department of Sociology

Overview

Dr Ana Villar joined the Centre for Comparative Social Surveys as Research Fellow in January 2012. Her main focus is on the ESS's Mixed Mode Methodology Programme, but she is also overseeing the use of an 'innovation sample' to test the quality of new and existing questions. Under the FP7 funded DASISH project, she is part of a team developing an interactive online tool which documents the translation process for items fielded on the ESS.

Dr Villar studied Psychology at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and worked there for three years as a researcher at the department of Methodology of the Behavioral Sciences. In 2002 she won a scholarship to complete a masters degree in Quantitative Analysis in the Social Sciences at the Catholic University of Brussels, in Belgium. She completed her doctorate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln at the Survey Research and Methodology program, while working as research assistant at the Gallup Research Center. In her dissertation she explored the effects of answer scale translation and cross-cultural differences in response styles and response distributions.

In 2009 she joined Jon Krosnick's Political Psychology Research group at Stanford University as research affiliate where she conducted research on methodological aspects of online panel surveys, nonresponse error and measurement error, and survey weighting.  She also collaborated in the implementation and analysis of surveys on public opinion on global warming for the Woods Institute for Environmental Research, and has worked investigating trends in public opinion of climate change and its causes.

Research interests

Her ongoing research interests encompass the study of measurement error due to questionnaire design, nonresponse bias in telephone surveys, measurement error in online surveys, the use of interpreters in survey interviews, nonresponse bias, data collection mode effects and public opinion of climate change. 

Her research interests also include measurement error in multilingual surveys and cultural differences in survey responding.

Publications

Villar, Ana and Krosnick, Jon, 2011. "Global Warming vs. Climate Change, Taxes vs. Prices, Does Word Choice Matter?" Climatic Change, 105:1-12.

Harkness, Janet A., Villar, Ana, and Edwards, Brad. 2010. "Translation, Adaptation, and Design." In Survey Methods in Multinational, Multicultural and Multiregional Contexts, edited by Janet A. Harkness, Michael Braun, Brad Edwards, Timothy Johnson, Lars Lyberg, Peter Ph. Mohler, Beth-Ellen Pennell, & Tom W. Smith. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 115-140.

Harkness, Janet A., Edwards, Brad, Hansen, Sue Ellen, Miller, Debra, and Villar, Ana. 2010. "Designing Questionnaires for Multipopulation Research." In Survey Methods in Multinational, Multicultural and Multiregional Contexts, edited by Janet A. Harkness, Michael Braun, Brad Edwards, Timothy Johnson, Lars Lyberg, Peter Ph. Mohler, Beth-Ellen Pennell, & Tom W. Smith. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 31-57.

Yang, Yongwei, Harkness, Janet A., Chin, Tzu-Yun, and Villar, Ana 2010. "Response Styles and Culture." In Survey Methods in Multinational, Multicultural and Multiregional Contexts, edited by Janet A. Harkness, Michael Braun, Brad Edwards, Timothy Johnson, Lars Lyberg, Peter Ph. Mohler, Beth-Ellen Pennell, & Tom W. Smith. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 203-223.

Villar, Ana (2008). Response Bias. In Encyclopedia of Survey Research Methods, edited by Paul J. Lavrakas, Newbury Park, CA: Sage, vol. 2, 751-753.