Monetary Incentives in the Consumer Expenditure Interview Survey: An Assessment of Data Quality

• Activity Number: 286 - Tracking and Evaluating Quality on the Road to a Redesigned Consumer Expenditure Survey
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 1, 2017 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Government Statistics Section
• Author(s): Ian Elkin* and Brett McBride and Barry Steinberg
• Companies: Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Keywords: Incentives ; Data quality ; Household surveys

Abstract

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE) is working towards a redesign plan that includes incentives to address respondent motivation and to maintain or improve survey response rates, which have been trending downward. The purpose of a 2016 Incentives Field Test (IFT) was to assess the effectiveness of the incentive levels and structure as proposed in the redesign plan. The IFT tested the effect different incentive delivery procedures and incentive amounts had on survey costs, response rates, and data quality for the CE Interview Survey by providing households with a mixture of token incentives, incentives conditional on completing the survey, and incentives conditional on records use. The results of the IFT will be used to inform the overall redesign. This presentation will provide a high-level overview of the IFT design, focusing on the incentives structures and amounts, as well as provide results of data quality comparisons between three test samples and the control. These results will be of interest to survey methodologists, data producers, and data users.