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Session Details

Many survey research organisations are faced with the challenge of having to deal with change in their survey series. The impact of social media, big data, technological progress and falling response rate are forcing survey researchers to adapt more quickly to change than ever before. For organisations that have collected data over time, this need for change poses additional challenges as comparability with earlier rounds of data collection is at stake.

As an EU-Agency that has been fielding CAPI and CATI EU-wide representative surveys since 1990, Eurofound itself currently is faced by these challenges and has initiated a programme to develop a long-term vision for its surveys. In 2018, fieldwork on the European Company Survey (ECS) will move to CAWI, after previous rounds were done using CATI. The change from CAWI to CATI was preceded by several tests and a feasibility study. For the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) and the European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) one of the questions to consider is how long these Europe-wide surveys can continue to be fielded face-to-face.

In this session, we wish to bring together researchers/institutes to talk about how they deal with change in their surveys. Some of the issues that could be discussed during this session include:

• How survey organisations have managed transitions from one mode to another
• How much testing is needed when considering a mode switch?
• Trends: how important are they, what constitutes a trend and when is it broken
• How much longer can we carry out f-2-f surveys in Europe?
• Experiences of sampling with mode transitions
• How important are response rates, is online a viable solution
• Change and opportunities: how can we build the need for change into improvements in data collection?