Authors
Abstract
Within an international context of declining survey response rates and increasing survey costs, there is increasing emphasis on finding innovative ways to maintain response rates and improving the cost-effectiveness of fieldwork effort. One of the main components of survey costs is interviewer call attempts associated with making contact. An innovative approach to reducing these costs, pioneered by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) on the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLS79) in the US, is to encourage, using an additional incentive, sample members to initiate contact and book an appointment for their interview, rather than waiting for an interviewer to contact them. This paper describes a randomised experiment, conducted on the Innovation Panel of Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) in 2011, which sought to evaluate whether this ‘early bird’ approach could be successful in a UK context. Our experiment also included a treatment group who were not offered an incentive to become an ‘early-bird’ and were instead encouraged to book an appointment by an appeal to altruism. We found that significantly fewer call attempts were required for households who took up the early-bird offer. Our experimental and analytical approach meant that we were able to robustly attribute this reduction to the take-up of the offer. No impact on response rates was detected. We also found that although some respondents took up the offer as a result of the appeal to altruism, a higher proportion did so when an incentive to become an ‘early-bird’ was offered. However, overall the take-up of the early-bird offer was relatively low, and much lower than on NLSY79, and for this reason there was no overall reduction in fieldwork effort. This implies that the early-bird approach has the potential to reduce costs, but that further research is needed to examine ways of encouraging a higher proportion of respondents to set-up appointments for themselves.
Subjects
Link
http://www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/page.aspx?sitesectionid=939&sitesectiontitle=Recent+working+papers