Knocking on Respondents Doors: Interviewers and Unit Nonresponse in a Large Wealth Survey

• Activity Number: 590
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 7, 2013 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Tobias Schmidt*+ and Julia Le Blanc
• Companies: Deutsche Bundesbank and Deutsche Bundesbank
• Keywords: interviewer effects ; wealth survey ; unit non-response

Abstract

In this paper we analyse the impact of interviewers and regional characteristics on unit non-response and non-contact in a voluntary face-to-face survey of households. We contribute to the existing literature by studying area and interviewer effects as well as interactions of both within a unified framework. The data for our analysis comes from the new German survey on Private Households and their Finances (PHF), which oversamples "wealthy" areas in Germany. Making use of the special sampling design of the PHF, we analyse differences between wealthy and other regions as contact and cooperation behaviour across these groups may differ. Results from multilevel logistic regressions show that dissimilarities between areas with respect to wealth explain only a small part of the variance of households' response behaviour. Interviewer effects on the contrary explain large portions of the observed differences in contact and response outcomes.