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120 – Improving Efficiency and Maintaining High Data Quality: Plans and Early Outcomes for the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances

Using Propensity Scores to Inform Respondent Incentive Escalation

at Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

The triennial Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) has maintained response rates over time while collecting highly sensitive financial information. However, gaining cooperation from SCF sample members has presented challenges that often necessitate extending the data collection period. A new strategy for the 2016 SCF involves developing an "escalation need" score using aggregated, real-time case management data - including indicators of gated communities, locked buildings, and the number of past contact attempts - along with a measure of low response propensity from the Census Planning Database. In this paper we first share our methodology for developing the escalation need score - that is, the degree to which the household should be considered for incentive escalation based on factors historically associated with tough-to-reach households. Next, we describe how we are using this score to inform strategies for interviewing and offering respondent incentives in the 2016 SCF. Finally, we present early results from the first eleven weeks of data collection. We close with a brief discussion for fellow survey researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders challenged with the careful orchestration of field data collection in an era of declining response rates for U.S. household surveys.