ABSTRACT
Survey research is one of the most popular tools in the field of public administration. As public administration scholars make extensive use of surveys, they have started to pay attention to measurement approaches that help to ameliorate survey measurement errors. This entry provides a synopsis of several useful measurement approaches in public administration surveys. Specifically, it focuses on measurement approaches suitable for latent variable analysis, because public administration scholars often study latent concepts that are indirectly measured by multiple observed items. After an overview of the main issues that concern the quality and error components of survey measures, this entry compares different measurement approaches for scaling latent variables. This entry concludes with a brief discussion on the importance of understanding the pros and cons of different measurement approaches in public administration surveys.
