Some literature shows that children like opening their own letters. This experiment aimed to investigate whether using letters addressed to children affects their propensity to complete the youth survey.
Understanding Society’s standard approach at the time of this experiment was to send invites to the youth survey addressed to responsible adults (parents, carers, or guardians) in households where there is a child aged 10 to 15. These invites, addressed to the responsible adult, include the login details their child should use if they want to complete the survey online. If there are multiple eligible children in the household, the adult is sent a separate letter for each, each containing the login details for one child plus a copy of the youth questionnaire. For interviews conducted face-to-face, interviewers will write children’s names on their letters and envelopes, and seal the envelopes, before handing them over during the interview; for web respondents the letters will be mailed.
In this experiment we allocated half of the households to get special youth invites (if there are any youths in the household): the main outer envelope and the cover letter were still addressed to the responsible adult but inside the adult’s envelope there was another sealed envelope with the child’s name on it and the letter inside addressed to the child. This inner letter contained the login details to complete the youth survey. As with the standard approach, if there are multiple eligible children within the household, for each child a separate letter was sent to the adult, and each of these contained a copy of the paper version of the youth questionnaire.
Allocations
The variable controlling allocation to treatments, randomised at the household level:
FF_YTHLETW17 (1/2 allocated to each condition, allocation stratified by sampleorig, whether any children aged 12-15 in the household last wave {recoded version of p_nch1215_dv grouping all non-zero values}, ff_careexpw17 ff_incentw17 ff_gridmodew17)
1 Standard youth invite within adult letter
2 Youth invite in envelope addressed to youth
