Here - Tilburg University

Presenter
Busse, Britta; Darmstadt University of Technology
Authors
Marek Fuchs; Britta Busse; Darmstadt University of Technology
Title
Using an adaptive design in gaining cooperation. Enhancing the recruitment
success in a mobile phone panel survey
Abstract
In recent years declining response and cooperation rates have become a
serious threat to all kinds of surveys. This implies one, reduced sample sizes and
therefore inflating standard errors and decreasing accuracy of survey results,
and two, a potential increase of non-response biases since the population of
survey respondents might differ significantly from the non-responding
population. Both effects have especially severe consequences for panel surveys
since panel studies require large initial samples due to panel attrition (which
reduces sample size in addition to initial non-response). Also, non-response
biases that might be introduced into the panel will be carried on into every
following panel wave. Thus, when recruiting for a panel survey it is necessary to
avoid initial refusals and increase cooperation with the help of an effective
recruitment question wording. A common practice used in the initial phase of
telephone interviews in order to gain cooperation allays respondents’ concerns
with an appropriate interviewer statement addressing the respondents’ qualms.
We propose that – similar to these proactive interviewer persuasion statements
in the beginning of telephone interviews - a respondent-tailored conviction
strategy could enhance the success of a panel recruitment question. In practice
this could be implemented by differential recruitment question versions among
which the most promising one will be presented to the respondent, chosen based
on questions already answered by the respondent like survey attitudes items.
In this paper we will present results from a recruitment survey (n=1,600)
conducted in Germany for refreshing an ongoing mobile phone panel. We tested
four different recruitment question versions in a randomized between-subjects