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250 – Nonresponse

Response Rates Using Mass Mailing Tools in the National Children's Study

at NORC at the University of Chicago

Diminishing survey response rates are threatening the reliability and generalizability of survey results. Maintaining high participation is particularly important for longitudinal studies such as the National Children's Study (NCS), where attrition tends to increase over time. For the NCS, address quality impacts communication with participants, completion of mail surveys and in-person specimen collections, and linkage to existent data used to reduce response burden. For these reasons, an accurate participant mailing addresses is crucial. In this paper we test the use of Delivery Point Validation (DPV) codes and Residential Delivery Indicators (RDI) in an NCS mailing.
The United States Postal Service introduced DPV codes and RDI to identify potentially incorrect addresses prior to mailings. DPV codes help validate delivery address information by flagging incomplete or erroneous addresses, while RDIs indicate whether an address is residential, commercial, or rural. These tools are used to comply with USPS guidelines for mass mailers, but may also be useful for surveys. An analysis of the impact of using DPV codes and RDI for increasing address quality in a longitudinal study will be provided. Our preliminary results indicate that DPV and RDI do identify unreliable addresses, particularly among hard to reach populations, and that their use could substantially decrease undeliverable rates, and thereby potentially increase participant response rates, in longitudinal studies.