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The 'Most Mobile Human Population": Sampling Long-Haul Truckers Through a National Truck Stop Sample

*Louis Philip Rizzo, Westat 
Hongsheng Hao, Westat 
David Marker, Westat 
Karl Sieber, National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health 

Keywords: nationally representative, frame, estimated flow

US long-haul truck drivers are as mobile a human population as exists in the world, logging hundreds of thousands of miles of travel across the US each year. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and he Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration of the Department of Transportation sponsored the National Survey of U.S. Long-Haul Truck Driver Injury and Health in 2010 which collected information from long-haul truckers. Reaching truckers through a household survey would be prohibitively expensive given their small proportion (less than 1 percent) of the population. Another alternative would be to use employment lists from large trucking companies, but this would exclude independent truckers who are a large proportion of all truckers. Reaching them at home by telephone would not be productive since they are frequently not there. While they could be contacted by mobile phone (if you knew their telephone numbers), asking them about unsafe driving conditions while they drive would be counterproductive. Our methodology was to recruit truckers at truck stops across the country. As long-haul truckers tend to be in many places during their working days, the truck stops can be seen as simply a venue for reaching the truckers. A nationally representative sample of truck stops was drawn from a relatively complete frame from the Trucker’s Friend: a commercial national truck stop directory. We were successful in recruiting a large sample of truckers for the study (1,265 completed interviews), and more importantly are able to generalize this sample to the long-haul truckers population as a whole. This paper describes our sampling and weighting plan to achieve this goal of a nationally representative sample of long-haul truckers, our experiences with regard to implementation and lessons learned.