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Program is Subject to Change
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Can we get anything from non-respondents? A pilot test of the third European Survey of Enterprises on New and Emerging Risks (ESENER-3) (308206)
*Xabier Irastorza, European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA)Arnold Riedmann, Kantar
Keywords: cross-national survey, non-response
The third European Survey of Enterprises on New and Emerging Risks (ESENER) was fielded in 2019. Building on the experience of the first two waves, in 2009 and 2014, ESENER focuses on the management of occupational safety and health (OSH) in practice. In ESENER-3, 45,420 establishments employing at least five people and across all activity sectors (except for NACE T & U) were surveyed in 33 European countries, the target respondent being ‘the person who knows best about health and safety in the establishment’.
As is the case for other voluntary CATI establishment surveys, ESENER suffers from low response rates (particularly in some countries) and a possible selection bias, which may put into question some of the findings. In order to tackle the non-response bias, a more rigorous and improved approach to sampling was envisaged for ESENER-3, starting from the sample design, the business registers used and the weighting to be adopted, as well as the contact strategy to engage respondents.
In addition, ESENER-3 tried to gather information about the non-respondents in order to see whether they differ from respondents in a systematic way. The hypothesis was that establishments refusing participation in the survey have an inferior OSH performance/culture than those participating. A set of three statements on the OSH culture of the organisation was meant to test this. The questions were included in an identical form in both the mini-questionnaire to non-respondents and the regular questionnaire, allowing for direct comparisons.
The questions were tested in the pilot survey in February 2019 (1,059 interviews in 33 countries). The conference presentation will share the practical challenges related to the development and implementation of a questionnaire to non-respondents and the success of the experiment. It will present the differences between respondents and non-respondents as regards OSH culture and the decision taken for the main survey.