246 research outputs found
Modeling Cooperation in an Address-register-based Telephone/Face-to-face Survey
I analyze the effects of household sociodemography, interviewer perfor-
mance in the current survey, and fieldwork characteristics on cooperation
in a central telephone survey, where households with no publicly listed
landline number receive face-to-face visits. Using the 2013 refreshment
sample of the Swiss Household Panel, I employ household-interviewer
cross-classified multilevel models and analyze first and later contacts sepa-
rately. Some sociodemographic groups are less cooperative in the first con-
tact only, others in both the first and later contacts, and still others in later
contacts only. I offer recommendations about which households should be
finalized at the first contact, which should be transferred to the face-to-face
sample instead of being worked by telephone, and which interviewers
should work which household groups
Attrition when dropping CAPI from a CATI/CAPI panel survey
In this paper, we study attrition in a household panel survey, where in the first
wave those with a matched landline number were surveyed by telephone, while
those without received a face-to-face visit. In the second wave, the face-to-face
mode was dropped. We find among the first wave face-to-face households a high
likelihood to attrite due to "no contact" rather than due to "cannot be tracked"
or "refusal". Socio-demographic characteristics have the expected effects. For
example households with young children, with a short-term residence permit,
or one-person households cannot be tracked, while those with a face-to-face
visit in the first wave, or foreigners with a mother tongue that is not offered in
the survey refuse more often. More first wave calls and contacts are associated
with all reasons to attrite, in particular with refusal. Based on the findings, we
give recommendations to tailor fieldwork to decrease attrition
Sample Representation and Substantive Outcomes Using Web With and Without Incentives Compared to Telephone in an Election Survey
The objective of this article is to understand how the change of mode from telephone to web
affects data quality in terms of sample representation and substantive variable bias. To this
end, an experiment, consisting of a web survey with and without a prepaid incentive, was
conducted alongside the telephone Swiss election survey. All three designs used identical
questionnaires and probability samples drawn from a national register of individuals.
First, our findings show that differences in completion rates mostly reflect different levels
of coverage in the two modes. Second, incentives in the web survey strongly increase
completion rates of all person groups, with the exception of people without Internet access or
limited computer literacy. Third, we find voting behavior to be much closer to official figures
in the web with the incentive version compared to the two other designs. However, this is
partly due to the different sociodemographic compositions of the samples. Other substantive
results suggest that the incentive version includes harder-to-reach respondents. Unit costs are
much lower in the two web designs compared to the telephone, including when a relatively
high incentive is used. We conclude that in countries with high Internet penetration rates such
as Switzerland, web surveys are already likely to be highly competitive
Coverage and nonresponse errors in an individual register frame-based Swiss telephone election study
Undercoverage and Nonresponse in a List-sampled Telephone Election Survey
For landline telephone surveys in particular, undercoverage has been a growing problem. However, research regarding the relative contributions of socio-demographic bias and other composition effects is scarce. We propose to address this issue by analyzing an election survey which used a sample from a register-based sampling frame containing basic socio-demographic information and to which telephone numbers were subsequently matched.
With respect to socio-demographic representation of the final sample, we find that difficult to match groups are also difficult to contact, while those who cooperate tend to have different characteristics. We find bias due to undercoverage to be of greater magnitude than noncontact bias, while noncooperation falls between the two. As for substantive variables, both additional efforts to match missing telephone numbers and the construction of better weights are successful in closing the gap between survey estimates of voting behavior and true values from the election results
Language Ability and Motivation among Foreigners in Survey Responding
With increasing migration and linguistic diversification in many countries, survey researchers and methodologists should consider whether data provided by individuals with variable levels of command of the survey language are of the same quality. This paper examines the question of whether answers from resident foreign respondents who do not master available survey languages may suffer from problems of comprehension of survey items, especially items that are more complicated in terms of content and/or form. In addition, it addresses the extent to which motivation may affect the response quality of resident foreigners. We analyzed data from two large-scale surveys conducted in Switzerland, a country with three national languages and a burgeoning foreign population, employing a set of dependent measures of response quality, including don't know responses, extreme responding, mid-5 responding, recency effects, and straight-lining. Results show overall poorer response quality among foreigners, and indicate that both reduced language mastery and motivation among foreigners are relevant factors. This is especially true for foreign groups from countries that do not share a common language with those spoken in Switzerland. A general conclusion is that the more distant respondents are culturally and linguistically from the majority mainstream within a country, the more their data may be negatively affected. We found that more complex types of questions do generally lead to poorer response quality, but to a much lesser extent than respondent characteristics, such as nationality, command of the survey language, level of education, and age
A Note on Interviewer Performance Measures in centralised CATI Surveys
Interviewer performance with respect to convincing sample members to participate in surveys is an important dimension of survey quality. However, unlike in CAPI surveys where each sample case 'belongs' to one interviewer, there are hardly any good measures of interview performance for centralised CATI surveys, where even single contacts are assigned to interviewers at random. If more than one interviewer works one sample case, it is not clear how to attribute success or failure to the interviewers involved. In this article, we propose two correlated methods to measure interviewer contact performance in centralised CATI surveys. Their modelling must take complex multilevel clustering effects, which need not be hierarchical, into account. Results are consistent with findings from CAPI data modelling, and we find that when comparing effects with a direct ('naive') measure of interviewer contact results, interviewer random effects are largely underestimated using the naive measure
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