Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
December 15, 2014
Summary:
One of the main components of survey costs is interviewer call attempts
associated with making contact. This paper describes
an experiment conducted on a U.K. household panel
study, which sought to evaluate whether an “early-bird” approach whereby
participants are encouraged to contact their
interviewer before fieldwork began in order to set up an appointment
could increase
fieldwork efficiency by reducing the number of
calls required. This approach has been successfully used on the National
Longitudinal
Study of Youth 1979 cohort for some time but has
not been evaluated experimentally. Our experiment involved two treatment
groups: one group was promised a modest financial
incentive (£5 per participant) to take up the “early-bird” offer and
complete
an interview, and the other received an appeal to
their altruistic tendencies that emphasized that being an “early bird”
would
make their interviewer's life easier. A parallel
experiment sought to evaluate the impact of differential standard
incentives
on response. The early-bird take-up rate was higher
for the incentivized group (10 percent compared with 6 percent for the
non-incentivized group) and was highest when
combined with the higher standard incentive rate (17 percent). Offering
both
an early-bird incentive and the higher standard
incentive did increase overall fieldwork efficiency, as measured by
calls
required per completed case, but the modest take-up
rates meant that the overall impact was fairly minimal. The paper also
finds indicative evidence that the early-bird
offer, if sufficiently incentivized, could potentially have a beneficial
impact
on response rates.
Published in
Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology
Volume and page numbers
Volume: 2 , p.484 -497
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jssam/smu017
ISSN
23250984
Subjects
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