ESRA 2025 Preliminary Program
All time references are in CEST
Get in touch–stay in touch: Efficient and suitable recruitment and survey strategies |
| Session Organisers |
Dr Roman Auriga (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories)
Mr André Müller-Kuller (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories)
Ms Anna Passmann (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories)
|
| Time | Tuesday 15 July, 14:00 - 15:00 |
| Room |
Ruppert 111 |
This year's session will focus on appropriate and efficient recruitment and fieldwork strategies in current population-representative surveys. In both individual and institutional survey settings, recruitment of survey participants has been under "pressure to change" for several years. On the one hand, we face declining response rates in surveys. On the other hand, recruiting participants seems to have become more and more expensive over the years due to inflation, salary developments and change in employment relationships regarding the survey stuff or more complex survey requirements and designs. Social changes must also be taken into account: Due to the increasing factual and perceived heterogeneity of societies, expectations regarding the characteristics of the target persons to be recruited and the ways how to address them appropriately are also becoming increasingly complex. Suitable recruitment and survey designs must therefore be found.
In this session, we want to discuss innovations in survey designs and methods under the premise of optimizing and balancing survey success and costs. In particular, tailored recruitment strategies in terms of mixed approaches (e.g. sequential designs and/or pre-recruitment strategies), incentive strategies (e.g. pre-incentives, promised or perceived benefits of participation), contact strategies (e.g. adaptations in the language used, layout of materials, new media), but also field work strategies and interviewer tasks should/could be at focus.
We welcome contributions with insights into the recruitment of large-scale studies of the last five years. “Quantitative” findings as well as well documented “qualitative” experiences are both welcome.
Keywords: recruitment, efficiency, costs, innovation, response rates, tailored designs
Papers
Staying in touch with (temporary) dropouts by targeted incentive strategies? Experimental Evidence from a Probability-Based Online Panel
Dr Jean Philippe Décieux (University of Bonn & Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB)) - Presenting Author
Dr Andreas Ette (Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB))
his study examined whether survey participation among (temporary) dropouts from previous waves could be influenced by targeted incentives. For this purpose, two split-ballot experiments were conducted within this group of (temporary) dropouts: In wave 4, we compared the effects of switching from a conditional 5-Euro post-paid incentive to a 10-Euro incentive versus consistently offering a 5-Euro incentive. In wave 5, the initial 5-Euro group received 10 Euros, while the 10-Euro group from wave 4 was split into two subgroups—one continuing to receive 10 Euros and the other reverting to 5 Euros. The experiments were carried out within the BiB/FReDA survey “Refugees from Ukraine,” a probability-based register sample. The key performance indicators of our analysis will be wave-specific and cumulative response rates. Additionally, we reflects aspects of data quality, demographic composition, and survey costs.
Preliminary results suggest that targeted incentive increases positively impacted participation among the (temporary) dropout group. As in wave 4, participation was higher when a 10-Euro incentive was offered. However, our second experiment complemented that the increase in participation was primarily driven by the higher incentive: response rates were highest among those who received 10 Euros in both waves, followed by the group that switched from 5 Euros in wave 4 to 10 Euros in wave 5. Both groups outperformed the group that switched from 10 Euros in wave 4 to 5 Euros in wave 5.
These initial findings suggest that higher incentives can effectively re-engage (temporary) dropouts. However, to maintain this positive effect and ensure panel stability, consistently offering higher incentive values may be necessary.
Possibilities and potential for increasing the cost efficiency of surveys
Mr André Müller-Kuller (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories) - Presenting Author
Ms Viktoria Zorn (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories)
The available budget and resources significantly influence how and what data can be collected, as well as its quality. This fundamental judgement, impressively illustrated by Groves in 1989, is still valid and continues to gain importance. Over the past decades, costs and efforts associated with surveys have steadily increased, suggesting that the cost of data collection will continue to rise. Consequently, the question of possibilities and potential for controlling these costs arises. For researchers, especially those who design and conduct surveys, understanding how various cost drivers affect both costs and quality and/or errors at all stages of the process is crucial. With regard to efficient survey designing, the key questions remain or have become even more urgent: How do costs vary across different types and designs of surveys? How do different design features (components) impact costs? The decomposition of survey costs is challenging, as it depends on the availability of information (transparency), the complexity of the surveys themselves, and the comparability of costs. Early survey cost approaches focussed on individual survey and/or cost components with limited scope and practical restrictions in terms of implementation options. Although the development and variation of survey costs have increasingly attracted attention in recent years, data and research that explicitly address survey costs remain scarce. This applies in particular to surveys that are commissioned rather than carried out by the researchers themselves and especially to panel studies. In this paper we examine survey costs across different cohorts of a panel study (NEPS). Design and cost information has been collected over more than a decade at various aggregation levels. Drawing on the typology by Olson et al. (2021), we examine costs components of commissioned interviewer-administered surveys (CATI/CAPI) and analyze cost and design factors with regard to possibilities and potential for increasing efficiency.
Interviewers as touchpoint - their effforts and success during recruitment over the last 10 years
Ms Birgit Jesske (infas Institute for Applied Social Sciences)
Mr Michael Ruland (infas Institute for Applied Social Sciences) - Presenting Author
Interviewers are an important team player during fieldwork. They have to deal with the complex survey designs of different studies and fulfill the specific requirements in each study. And last but not least, they are confronted with the low willingness and poor reachability of respondents.
Are all interviewers affected in the same way by the changed survey conditions of recent years? Even if numerous deployment strategies are used by survey institutes or special studies, it is generally known that different interviewers have different response rates. In many panel surveys, interviewer continuity is considered in order to avoid panel attrition. Interviewers are deployed close to their place of residence, not least for cost reasons and may be subject to access restrictions that vary from region to region. However, experienced interviewers are sometimes more successful because they have a broader range of contact strategies to convince reluctant respondents.
With the interviewer administration file at infas, we have a database with which we can analyze the performance of over 3,000 interviewers over the last 10 years, both in the context of panel surveys and large-scale cross-sectional surveys or ad hoc studies. In our multivariate analysis model, we can control the development of response rates over time, both according to the design of the studies and the characteristics of the interviewers. In addition, contact log files from the panel study “Labor Market and Social Security” (PASS) provide further insights into the contact strategies and the contact effort that interviewers had to make over the last 10 years to both re-contact panel participants and recruit new participants.
With our paper we would like to provide further insights into the tasks and commitment of interviewers in fieldwork and contribute additional aspects to the discussion of suitable recruitment and survey strategies.
