Experimenting with Pre-Contact Strategies for Reducing Nonresponse in an Economic Survey

• Activity Number: 313
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 3, 2010 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Alfred David Tuttle*+ and Richard S. Hough and Jeri Mulrow and Kenneth M. Pick and Diane K. Willimack
• Companies: U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau and National Science Foundation and U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau
• Keywords: establishment survey ; contact strategies ; pre-survey notice ; experiment

Abstract

The new Business R&D and Innovation Survey, co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Census Bureau, is conducted annually with a sample of about 40,000 US private sector companies. To maximize the success of the survey we conducted an experiment with historically problematic respondents and non-responders. In the control treatment, we sent a pre-survey letter to the respondent of record requesting updated contact information for the appropriate recipient of the survey. In the experimental treatment we sent the request to a company executive. We present the results of this experiment, assessing the effect of the experimental strategy on response rates and other outcomes of interest.