Tuesday 16th July
Wednesday 17th July
Thursday 18th July
Friday 19th July
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Longitudinal surveys – Tracking in panel studies |
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| Convenor | Dr Jutta Von Maurice (NEPS) |
| Coordinator 1 | Mrs Joanne Corey (Australian Bureau of Statistics) |
The session will cover the organisation of panel studies, from tracking of respondents and sample review prior to field enumeration, the recruitment and training of Interviewers, through to field logistics, field monitoring, and reporting. The focus is on the particular challenges faced by those running panel studies such as:
- Finding effective and reliable tracking methods to find non-contacts and participants with changed life situations from previous waves prior to field enumeration;
- The value of continuing with participants that have been long-term non-contacts or refusals. For sample management and data collection, there is a lot of effort put into these groups, through tracking and interviewer f2f visits, but also a lot of effort goes into this group through instrument design (roll-forward and catch up questions);
- Developing effective engagement strategies aimed at ensuring the long term commitment of respondents of different age groups;
- Conducting standardised Interviewer training across a large interview panel and also conducting of Interviewer training each wave when a significant amount of the content remains stable, yet the Interviewer panel contains a mix of new and experienced Interviewers;
- Regular field logistics, such as starting the field and taking into account that environment and context could have changed since the last field period;
- Monitoring field progress, taking into account the length of the enumeration period, keeping track of refusal and non-contacts, and managing transitions in life paths such as from kindergarten to school or from primary school to secondary school;
- Reporting during enumeration - how often, what to report on, presentation and usefulness of reports.
For panel studies like the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), it is of vital importance to keep the respondents on board and gather information over the life course in a consistent way. In the school cohorts of NEPS, tests and questionnaires are administered in groups at school. As long as the respondents visit the schools where NEPS is conducted, it is comparatively easy to reach the respondents and to keep them in the panel. However, if a respondent leaves the NEPS school because he or she has changed school, or if his or her school cancels its participation in the study, a different way must be found to stay in contact with this special group of respondents and to collect data in a way that is comparable to the main field survey. Therefore, a concept to survey the life course of these respondents in an individualized way has been developed by NEPS.
The proposed article introduces the concept of individual retracking applied in, and planned for, the school cohorts of NEPS and provides insight into the practice and challenges of this kind of data collection.
Most longitudinal surveys devote considerable resources to tracking sample members who move, usually with a great deal of success (Couper and Ofstedal, 2009). On face-to-face longitudinal surveys, field tracking by interviewers accounts for a large part of this success. However, field tracking is generally more expensive than remote, office-based tracking methods. Therefore, many longitudinal survey managers are particularly concerned with finding effective and reliable tracking methods prior to field enumeration.
There has been increasing interest in recent years in enhancing survey data through linkage to administrative data (Calderwood and Lessof, 2009). In addition to enhancing the scientific value of survey data, data linkage offers opportunities to enhance survey practice, particularly in relation to tracking respondents.
This paper will present evidence on using administrative data to track participants on the most recent waves of the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) in 2012. Health records were used for tracking on both studies, and education records were also used on MCS. This paper will compare effectiveness of these two different types of administrative data for MCS, and will compare the effectiveness of tracking through health records for two different study populations; 11-year-old children in the case of MCS and 42-year-old adults in the case of BCS70. It will examine the proportion of mover cases for which new addresses were found, and use fieldwork para-data to ascertain whether the participants were successfully located, and interviewed, at these new addresses.
Panel Studies broach the problematic nature of non-contacts in many ways. Nonresponse basically do not only reduce the size of a panel sample over the waves, often they even systematically affect the panel base. Sample members who drop are often different from those who stay in the panel. Strategies in survey design and throughout data collection aim at preventing nonresponse or at working on them by means of specific actions resp. at remedying them.
With PASS (household panel survey for labour market, welfare state and poverty research in Germany) serving as an example, strategies regarding the handling of non-contacts will be shown. These also include the particular features of PASS design like e.g. the switch between data collection mode and specific contacting strategies, yet also a complex and elaborate tracking procedure. Strategies and proceedings have been optimised throughout the meanwhile seven waves and experimentally tested in parts. Therefore, these results provide information on effort and success for individual cases as well as the panel base.
The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) maintains the contact information for approximately 10,000 families across Australia. These families are contacted every two years to carry out a voluntary face-to-face interview. LSAC has applied various strategies to acquire and maintain the contact information, however, each collection phase there has been 5-6% with whom the study is unable to make contact.
The primary method to stay in touch with families is to collect several types of contact details during the face-to-face interview; however, some panel families have not provided Interviewers with the full set of contact details. To address this, LSAC developed a web form designed for panel families to log in and check and update their preloaded contact details, fill in missing information, and report on the likelihood of these details changing in the next 12 months. To encourage panel members to complete the online form, members who submitted their form by a certain date went into a prize draw to win one of six $200 pre-paid gift cards. Reminder cards, letters, and SMS, were sent to panel members that did not respond which highlighted their chance to win a prize if they submit their form.
This paper discusses how effective the web form was as a method to maintain panel families' contact details in-between waves, including how many contact details were updated, added and deleted; the impact of the targeted reminders; the reaction of families to the online methodology; and the effectiveness on the Wave 5 non-contact rate.