Category: Telephone Surveys

2Way back in June of 2006 I did a post on automated telephone surveys.  These are telephone surveys that use RDD samples to initiate calls to households and then try to administer an IVR survey.  Not humans involved.  The leading practitioner of this approach is Survey USA, a company that spends a good deal of…

There is an interesting article in the current issue of POQ that reports on a meta-analysis of the literature on the effect of advance letters on response rates in telephone surveys. The analysis shows that they continue to have an effect, increasing response rates on average at around eight or 10 points. Because the authors…

In a previous post I wrote about the slow steady decline in response rate on UM’s Survey of Consumer Attitudes.  Richard Curtin, Eleanor Singer (an MSI client) and Stanley Presser have just published (Journal of Official Statistics, 23, 91-106) the results of an incentive experiment designed to understand whether alarger incentive can stem the tide.…

We recently fielded a query from a client who has a long running, general population telephone survey but now faces some internal pressures to consider mail.  His request to us was to supply him with some information to help with that decision.  Dan Zahs and I put our heads together and produced a short overview…

Less than a week ago I posted an item on this topic that more or less concluded that we don’t need to worry yet.  Then I went to AAPOR and my nervousness on this issue is up a notch, maybe two. The talk of the conference was a new report from CDC saying that 15.8…

Over the last five or six years there has been increasing hand wringing about the emerging phenomenon of households that have only cell phones and no landline telephone.  The problem is that those cell-only households fall outside of the standard RDD sampling frame.  You sometimes see this referred to as "frame deterioration."  As the number…

When the Federal Do Not Call Registry was established in 2003 there was considerable speculation in the research industry around its likely impact on survey participation.  Some people hoped that an overall reduction in calls going to registered households might increase the likelihood that people would start answering the phone again and agreeing to do…

I just had reason to go back and take another look at an article that appeared in Public Opinion Quarterly back in 2005.  It was written by three researchers at UM (Richard Curtin, Stanley Presser, and Eleanor Singer) and looks in some detail at the declining response on one of the most well known telephone…

I recently had someone ask me about the effectiveness of those automated surveys where the phone number is computer dialed and the respondent is immediately put into an IVR interview.  This is a pretty inexpensive methodology and the obvious question is whether these surveys are as "good" as a standard telephone interview with a live…