My own professional opinion on the subject is that validity depends on the subject of the survey. If you ask them matter of fact questions, such as personal or financial resources designated to particular projects, chances are that whoever received these surveys in an organization will forward them to the person responsible for these projects or to accountants doing their books (who are often outside consulting firms), and the chances are you will get either reasonably accurate answers or no answers at all if answering your questions proves too cumbersome. These guys are usually busy and have no incentive to lie - they will either answer your questions if they can do it easily or pass. So one one way of testing for a potential bias in your responses is to examine non-response and see if there is any systematic difference between respondents and non-respondents.
On the other hand, if you ask general opinion questions chances are you will get generic PR-correct responses no matter who answers your survey - but you can reasonably expect that without having a survey. Asking for opinions of corporate men or women is a very tricky business and requires very skilled interviewers. If you rely on mail surveys, you may as well spare yourself the trouble and red the corporate propaganda instead - same answers but at a much lower cost.
In any case, depending on the size of your sample I would run a comparison of answers to questions that you suspect may be affected by the respondent rule (i,e, who answers the questionnaire - questions answered by consultants may be considered "proxy responses" so you may want to look for that term too) to see if there are any systematic differences. Respondent rule is a very tricky thing: sometimes it introduces a bias, sometimes it does not. I would look for literature discussing effects of respondent rule on the particular type of survey that is of interest of you - if you can find any. As I already said, I do not think that proxy answers introduce a systematic bias in organizational surveys as long as the answers are produced by sourcing written records, but this may vary depending what questions you ask in your survey.
I hope this is useful.
Wojtek
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 12:04 PM, Gar Lipow <gar.lipow at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was sent a study recently that consisted of firms who had taken
> money for projects which they claimed would meet certain goals
> voluntarily filling out a survey rating how well the completed
> projects achieved those goals. The forms to obtain the money were
> filled out by consultants, while the forms were (probably) filled out
> by firm internal staff. (There was nothing that actually prevented
> them using the same consultants to fill out the forms.) Is this a
> valid methodology in sociology and other social sciences? I know that
> for certain kinds of in-depth studies on technical issues voluntary
> surveys are sometimes used, but is it still valid when there is such a
> strong incentive to claim success? Every firm taking part has hopes of
> getting even more funding in the future.
>
> --
> Facebook: Gar Lipow Twitter: GarLipow
> Grist Blog: http://www.grist.org/member/1598
> Static page: http://www.nohairshirts.com
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>