Here - Tilburg University

Presenter
Engel, Uwe; Dept. of Social Sciences, University of Bremen
Authors
Uwe Engel; Simone Bartsch and Helen Vehre; University of Bremen
Title
Who joins a probability based access panel?
Abstract
As part of the German Priority Programme on Survey Methodology
(www.survey-methodology.de), large random telephone samples for the adult
population of Germany were drawn to build up an access panel for the three
survey modes fixed-line, mobile-phone, and online-interviewing. 14,200 realized
interviews yielded a net panel size of 6,600 people.
The study design involves recruitment interviews of 20 minutes of length
on average. The questionnaire programme focuses on variables expected to be
relevant for explaining survey participation in one way or another (e.g., survey
items related to social exchange and inte-gration, attitudes toward survey
research, prior survey experience, personality traits, com-munication habit).
A key feature of the study consists in an experimental design that, for
refusal conversion attempts, combines interviewer tailoring efforts with the offer
of ‘core interviews’ (of about half the full interview length) and ‘exit interviews’
(consisting of just two questions on prior survey experience). In this way a
limited amount of survey data is obtained for respondents who were otherwise
non-respondents. In addition to the survey data from full-interview participants,
we now have for two subsets of the whole variable list corresponding informa-
tion also from core-interview and exit-interview participants. Hence it is possible
to include the respective survey variables (along with paradata) in a model to
predict the probability of obtaining a full recruitment interview.
A further key feature of the study consists in a heavy use of paradata and
metadata to predict response propensities. The available paradata includes
information about the se-quences of events that occurred during the process of
repeated contact attempts. We iden-tified all such sequences and coded them
into a typology of 22 contact courses. Also availa-ble is the number of contact