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Abstract:
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A recent survey climate of decreasing response rates and increasing budgetary constraints has burdened surveys in a wide range of fields. Survey sponsors are looking for ways to not only increase response, but also to most effectively allocate their limited resources. Ideally, a survey sponsor could leverage historic data from previous data collection cycles to estimate survey costs and optimize the next cycle’s budget. The National Household Education Survey (NHES) is a national, cross-sectional survey of households sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Using a variety of sources, we constructed cost estimates for both the 2016 and 2019 NHES data collection cycles. Using only our 2016 cost estimates, our goal is to analyze prior cost trends, and to model future cost trends for the 2019 cycle. We can then compare our predictions to the actual incurred costs in the 2019 NHES. Information about the tradeoff between cost and response rate are critical to the design of all surveys, from basic cost estimation to the development and implementation of alternative data collection features.
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