Transitioning from RDD to ABS in the National Household Education Surveys Program

• Activity Number: 557
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Kwang Kim*+ and Jill M. Montaquila and J. Michael Brick
• Companies: Westat and Westat and Westat
• Keywords: Experiment ; response rate ; coverage ; two-phase

Abstract

The National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES), a system of periodic surveys sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics, was fielded nine times using landline random digit dialing (RDD) between 1991 and 2007. Following the 2007 administration, with landline RDD coverage and response rates experiencing steep declines, NHES underwent a redesign. A two-phase address based sampling (ABS) approach, with mail as the primary mode, was pilot tested in 2009. Using findings from the 2009 Pilot Study, a large-scale methodological field test was designed. This Field Test, conducted in 2011, contained several methodological experiments aimed at affecting response propensities. With a nationally representative sample of nearly 40,000 addresses plus an additional supplemental sample of about 20,000 addresses that targeted Spanish speakers, this very large-scale Field Test was designed to support detection of small but substantively important effects. In this presentation, we discuss the NHES program's transition to ABS, describe the design of the Field Test, and review some key findings from the Field Test experiments and consider the implications for future ABS studies.