Tuesday 14th July      Wednesday 15th July      Thursday 16th July      Friday 17th July     

Thursday 16th July, 11:00 - 12:30 Room: O-202

Longitudinal surveys - challenges in running panel studies 2
Convenor	Dr Jutta Von Maurice (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectoires )
Coordinator 1	Ms Joanne Corey (Australian Bureau of Statistics)

Session Details

Longitudinal surveys - challenges in running panel studies.

This session will focus on the organisation of panel studies, including panel maintenance, panel engagement, sample review processes, choice of data items and methodologies, and interviewer training.

The focus is on the particular challenges faced by those running panel studies such as:

. maintaining up-to-date contact information and tracking of respondents, including privacy concerns;

. engaging repsondents over the life of the survey, particularly for different age groups, for example how to keep young people interested as they move from children to young adults and they become the primary consenter;

. how successful are different modes for making contact, e.g. mail, phone, text;

. do targeted approach stategies work, e.g. different approach letters depending on past wave response;

. decision making guidelines about when a respondent should be removed from the sample;

. the debate between longitudinal consistency and using a better/updated measure;

. how to conduct training for a mix of experienced and new interviewers, balanced with the amount of new content and methodologies; and

.testing techniques for longitudinal surveys.

Paper Details

1. What drives the participation in a monthly research web panel? The experience of ELIPSS, a French random web panel in the general population
Mr Stéphane Legleye (INED)
Mr Nirintsoa Razakamanana (INED)
Miss Anne Cornilleau (Sciences-Po)

When recruited in a monthly research panel, what drives panelists to participate to the surveys? We use the 22 first monthly surveys of the French random ELIPSS pilot study to answer this question. We first describe the successive participations and dropping out of the 1039 panelists by sequence analyses. Then we try to identify as early as possible the panelists who shortly will not participate or quit the panel by using various types of information: household and individual characteristics, first survey participations, reminders, official announcements of topics and duration of the surveys, and duration of fieldwork.

2. How to predict (and to prevent) panel attrition in different age groups: Newer and older aspects of panel dropout
Dr Bettina Langfeldt (Helmut-Schmidt-University, Germany)

Panel attrition is one of the main problems in longitudinal surveys. To be able to organise panel studies more target-group-orientated in terms of preventing non-response, further knowledge about the predictors of panel attrition is necessary. Therefore, the paper has a twofold focus: A) It examines whether the nature and potential causes of panel attrition are the same for different age groups (children, adolescents, and adults). B) It analyses the relevance of satisficing, the civic mindedness of the respondents, and the satisfaction with the state of health as predictor for panel.

3. Tracking of respondents in the Russian panel study of educational and occupational trajectories
Mrs Valeriya Malik (HSE (Higher School of Economics, Russia))

This paper provides an outline of respondents tracking methods used in a large-scale Russian panel study of youth and the effectiveness of these methods.
The study is based on the TIMSS 2011 sample of 8 grades students (5 thousand respondents) who have been followed up regularly.
Methods of tracking include administrative data collection from schools about students’ educational trajectories and their contact information, an additional short CATI survey implemented after 11th grade to gather information about the universities respondents entered and their plans to change place of residence, and data gathered from open sources about students’ enrollment in universities.

4. The effect of cross-wave incentives on panel stability and loyalty of school leavers to the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS)
Ms Anne Kersting (infas Institute for Applied Social Sciences, Bonn, Germany)
Professor Reinhard Pollak (WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin, Germany / Freie Universität Berlin)
Mr Michael Ruland (WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin, Germany)

It is essential in panel studies to ensure the long-term commitment of respondents and to avoid nonresponse bias. In the school-leaver-sample of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we use well-established measures and innovative cross-wave-incentive to ensure panel stability. The respondents (school leavers aged 15-17) were informed that their continuous partic-ipation in five survey waves would lead to their participation in a lottery with prizes such as a car and other giveaways. Our paper examines the effect of this additional cross-wave-incentive on respondents’ participation and the overall panel stability.

5. Effectiveness of a Time-Limited Incentive on Participation by Hard-to-Reach Respondents in a Panel Study
Dr Paula Fomby (University of Michigan)
Dr Narayan Sastry (University of Michigan)
Dr Katherine Mcgonagle (University of Michigan)

We describe results of an experiment in which a random sample of 200 hard-to-reach respondents were offered a supplementary incentive to complete all survey components of a study during a three-week winter holiday period. Sample members were primary caregivers of children included in the 2014 Child Development Supplement to the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The incentive provided $50 to caregivers who completed a 75-minute telephone interview and whose eligible children each completed a 30-minute interview. This paper describes the immediate and long-term impact of the incentive on participation and assesses effectiveness