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Activity Number:
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313
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Type:
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Contributed
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Date/Time:
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Wednesday, August 11, 2004 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
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Sponsor:
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Section on Government Statistics
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| Abstract - #300818 |
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Title:
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Measuring the Impact of Questionnaire and Envelope Messages on Respondent Behavior
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Author(s):
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Theresa F. Leslie*+ and Deborah H. Griffin and Pamela D. McGovern and David A. Raglin
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Companies:
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U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau
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Address:
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4700 Silver Hill Rd., 7600, Washington, DC, 20233-7600,
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Keywords:
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survey response ; voluntary data collection ; government surveys
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Abstract:
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Dillman et al. found that reminding respondents that the decennial census was mandatory by providing a "Your response is required by law" message on the envelope led to an increase in mail response of about 10%. A similar test was recently conducted to assess the impact of removing all references to mandatory in a household survey and replacing those messages with motivational information such as "Your response is important to your community." Two different voluntary messages were tested to assess respondent behavior. The test also evaluated if more user-friendly explanations of a mandatory survey still resulted in high levels of respondent cooperation. This test was conducted using the American Community Survey, a household survey collecting demographic, housing, social, and economic data. We determined that the removal of mandatory messages had a dramatic impact on cooperation rates by mail. We also found that varying messages within voluntary and within mandatory had only minor impacts. Little research exists to measure if varying motivational messages on the outgoing mail envelope leads to different levels of data completeness.
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