Proxy reports of others’ behaviors: when are they more accurate?

ABSTRACT

Surveys often ask people to report about someone else’s behavior. Two approaches to constructing a behavioral frequency judgment are recalling specific episodes of the other person’s behavior or using more general knowledge to infer a frequency judgment. A two-stage study was conducted with 40 roommate-pairs who maintained diaries for 7-days and then reported behavioral frequencies for themself and their roommate. Behavior regularity and relationship closeness were also measured. When general knowledge is cued, judgment error is negatively related to behavior regularity and relationship closeness, while cuing episodic-based recall resulted in less judgment error when regularity and relationship closeness are low.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [JMP], upon reasonable request.

Notes

¹ Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services (CMS) requires practice sites participating in the Primary Care First (PCF) payment model to administer the PECS.

² The research protocols and instruments used in this study were reviewed by the Institutional Review Board (IRB); all participants provided informed consent.

³ We also used a “raw error index” in our analyses. As the results from both of these indices are very similar, for brevity we report only the result of the absolute error index. Raw error index = [(judgment about roommate – actual behavior)/actual behavior].

⁴ The procedures and results of survey pre- and pilot tests are not generally reported in research articles (Presser et al., 2004; Ruel et al., 2016, pp. 117–118).

⁵ The number of times that roommates reported the participant observed the behavior was highly correlated with participants’ retrospective self-reports of how many times they observed their roommate engaging in each behavior (r’s ranging from .26 to .63, p’s ≤ .02).