Abstract In recent years, household surveys have expended significant effort to counter well-documented increases in direct refusals and greater difficulty contacting survey respondents. A substantial amount of fieldwork effort in panel surveys using telephone interviewing is devoted to the task of contacting the respondent to schedule the day and time of the interview. Higher fieldwork effort leads to greater costs and is associated with lower response rates. A new approach was experimentally evaluated in the 2017 wave of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) Transition into Adulthood Supplement (TAS) that allowed a randomly selected subset of respondents to choose their own day and time of their telephone interview through the use of an online appointment scheduler. TAS is a nationally representative study of US young adults aged 18–28 years embedded within the worlds’ longest running panel study, the PSID. This paper experimentally evaluates the effect of offering the online appointment scheduler on fieldwork outcomes, including number of interviewer contact attempts and interview sessions, number of days to complete the interview, and response rates. We describe panel study members’ characteristics associated with uptake of the online scheduler and examine differences in the effectiveness of the treatment across subgroups. Finally, potential cost-savingsmore »
Switching from telephone to web‐first mixed‐mode data collection: Results from the Transition into Adulthood Supplement to the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics
We conducted an experiment to evaluate the effects on fieldwork outcomes and interview mode of switching to a web-first mixed-mode data collection design (self-administered web interview and interviewer-administered telephone interview) from a telephone-only design. We examine whether the mixed-mode option leads to better survey outcomes, based on response rates, fieldwork outcomes, interview quality and costs. We also examine respondent characteristics associated with completing a web interview rather than a telephone interview. Our mode experiment study was conducted in the 2019 wave of the Transition into Adulthood Supplement (TAS) to the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). TAS collects information biennially from approximately 3,000 young adults in PSID families. The shift to a mixed-mode design for TAS was aimed at reducing costs and increasing respondent cooperation. We found that for mixed-mode cases compared to telephone only cases, response rates were higher, interviews were completed faster and with lower effort, the quality of the interview data appeared better, and fieldwork costs were lower. A clear set of respondent characteristics reflecting demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, technology availability and use, time use, and psychological health were associated with completing a web interview rather than a telephone interview.
- Award ID(s):
- 2042875
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10335593
- Journal Name:
- Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society)
- ISSN:
- 0964-1998
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Publisher's Version of Record
- https://doi.org/10.1111/rssa.12840
