The implementation of fieldwork design initiatives to improve survey quality

Abstract

This paper discusses six response maximisation initiatives implemented on Understanding Society (The UK Household Longitudinal Study). The activities aimed at increasing web response, youth response in households where adults completed the survey online, increasing the number of stable contacts and increasing the number of email addresses shared by the sample members. For each initiative we discuss the rationale, research design, results, costs and outcome. Whist we found that we could increase the response rate and the web take-up on the survey, one of the obstacles to wider adoption of these methods was that they were not cost effective.