Panel design effects on response rates and response quality

R. Seger and Philip Hans Franses

No EI 2007-29, Econometric Institute Research Papers from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus School of Economics (ESE), Econometric Institute

Abstract: To understand changes in individuals' opinions and attitudes it would be best to collect data through panels. Such panels, however, often cause irritation among respondents, resulting in low response rates and low response quality. We address whether this problem can be alleviated by designing a panel survey in an alternative way. For this purpose, we perform two field studies where we measure the effects of several panel design characteristics on response rates and response quality. These characteristics include the number of waves and the time between subsequent waves, which may either be fixed or random. Our findings suggest that response rates and response quality can be im-proved significantly by surveying at random time intervals. It is then crucial that panel members are not informed about the dates they will be surveyed, because in this case respondents are less likely to develop expectations as to when they will be surveyed again. The methodology we put forward can be used to improve the e±ciency of a panel study by carefully calibrating the studies' panel designs parameters.

Keywords: nonresponse; panel conditioning; panel design; randomized sampling; time sampling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 C42 C81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-08-29
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/10470/EI2007-29.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Panel design effects on response rates and response quality (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ems:eureir:10470

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Econometric Institute Research Papers from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus School of Economics (ESE), Econometric Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePub ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).