An Overview of the 2019 Research and Development Survey (RANDS)

• Activity Number: 352 - Small Area Estimation, Analysis of Complex Sample Survey Data, and New Advances for Health Surveys
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 12, 2021 : 10:00 AM to 11:50 AM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Li-Yen Rebecca Hu* and Yulei He and Paul Scanlon and Kristen Miller and Katherine Irimata and Guangyu Zhang and Kristen Cibelli Hibben
• Companies: NCHS and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Center for Health Statistics, CDC and NCHS and NCHS and CDC and NCHS
• Keywords: RANDS; questionnaire design; web survey; probability panel

Abstract

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) launched the Research and Development Survey (RANDS) series in 2015 to investigate the use of commercial probability panels for evaluating questionnaire design and developing statistical methodology. In 2019, NCHS contracted NORC at the University of Chicago (NORC) to conduct the third round of the RANDS (RANDS 3) as a cross-sectional survey administered in web-mode only. Probe questions and three major sets of experiments were embedded in RANDS 3 to assess question-response patterns, and participants were randomized into two or four groups for each major set of experiments. Among the 4,255 sampled individuals, 2,646 completed RANDS 3, resulting in a completion rate of 62% and a weighted cumulative response rate of 18%. In this presentation, we give an overview of RANDS 3 on questionnaire design and randomized experiments. Participants’ characteristics and key outcome measurements are summarized and compared between the two randomized groups involved in one major set of experiments, encompassing topics on affect, self-rated health, pain frequency and electronic cigarettes.