Eye Examinations as a Gold Standard to Evaluating Survey Instruments

Objective measures of health are relatively expensive; meanwhile, self-reports are critiqued to be subjective and not comparable. A middle ground approach is to apply the frontier work of vignette methods. The aim of the survey experiment is to explore the validity of survey instruments to identify students who need glasses, using objectively measured visual acuity as a gold standard. It is hypothesized that direct comparison against vignette (DCV) is significantly different from indirect comparison against vignette (ICV); meanwhile, self-assessment of vision (SAV) is significantly different from primed self-assessment of vision (PSAV). It is also hypothesized that DCV is a more valid survey instrument than ICV to classify students who need glasses, using objective visual acuity as a gold standard. Lastly, it is hypothesized that priming effect from vignettes improves the validity of self-assessment. It is planned to enroll 3,755 subjects in the survey experiment.