Development of Interviewer Response Rate Standards for National Surveys

Realistic response rate expectations are important for successfully allocating and managing data collection efforts under limited resources. Interviewer performance is often evaluated against response rate standards, and face-to-face interviewer performance can vary due to, in part, the socioeconomi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Field methods 2016-02, Vol.28 (1), p.21-37
Main Authors: Erdman, Chandra, Adams, Tamara, O’Hare, Barbara C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Census Figures
Community Characteristics
Correlation
Data collection
Geography
Homogeneity
Identification
Interviews
Multivariate Analysis
National Surveys
Neighborhoods
Participation
Regression (Statistics)
Response rates
Response Rates (Questionnaires)
Simulation
Socioeconomic Influences
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Summary:Realistic response rate expectations are important for successfully allocating and managing data collection efforts under limited resources. Interviewer performance is often evaluated against response rate standards, and face-to-face interviewer performance can vary due to, in part, the socioeconomic characteristics of the neighborhoods in which they work, reflecting well-documented differences in survey participation by these characteristics. In this article, we describe a method to establish unified, data-driven response rate standards to evaluate field interviewers. Using U.S. Census and American Community Survey data at the block-group level of geography, we identify correlates of 2010 census participation and cluster the block groups into homogeneous strata. The resulting clusters vary in meaningful ways to differentiate participation rates in household surveys. We use response rates by cluster to establish interviewer response rate standards for these sample surveys. We describe the process for simulating response rate distributions and the procedure for identifying performance-level cutoffs.
ISSN:1525-822X
1552-3969
DOI:10.1177/1525822X15574253