Darkness Made Visible: Field Management and Nonresponse in the 2004 SCF

• Activity Number: 239
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 9, 2005 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Arthur Kennickell*+
• Companies: Federal Reserve Board
• Keywords: Nonresponse ; Interviewers

Abstract

Survey nonresponse in field surveys is the joint outcome of the decision of survey staff to apply effort to inform and persuade respondents and the evaluation of such inputs by respondents. In most surveys, the field staff are under great pressure to produce completed interviews. Thus, as discussed in Kennickell [2004], they have an incentive to apply effort to cases that are most likely, in their view, to be completed with least effort. When the respondent characteristics involved in this evaluation are correlated with variables of interest in the survey, bias results unless a means can be found of discovering and adjusting for the underlying behavioral structures. But, absent constraints on the behavior of interviewers, the observed outcomes are contaminated by the endogeneity of effort---and only strong a priori assumptions could disentangle the interviewer effects from the respondent effects. To address this issue, the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances introduced a phased plan of sample management to make effort more nearly exogenous through the first two of three phases of field work.