Gaia, Alessandra;
Adali, Tugba;
Brown, Matt;
Fleetwood, Stella;
Lai, Christy;
(2025)
Response burden and survey participation. Experimental evidence on the effect of interview length on non-response conversion.
International Journal of Social Research Methodology
10.1080/13645579.2025.2537398.
(In press).
Preview |
PDF
Response burden and survey participation. Experimental evidence on the effect of interview length on non-response conversion.pdf - Accepted Version Download (809kB) | Preview |
Abstract
In a context of declining response rates, identifying best practices for non-response conversion is of key importance. Adopting experimental data from a large-scale web-first mixed mode longitudinal study (the Next Steps Age 32 survey), we examine whether re-contacting non-respondents after completing face-to-face fieldwork and inviting them to participate in a web-based non-response conversion survey can increase participation. Furthermore, we examine whether reducing interview length (from 60 to 20 minutes) at this final stage can further boost response. The interview length is reduced by both decreasing the number of questions and excluding additional elements, i.e. a cognitive assessment, requests for consent for administrative data linkage and an invitation to provide a biological (saliva) sample. The shorter non-response survey led to higher response rates, particularly for previous wave non-respondents, suggesting this is a promising practice for obtaining at least some information from individuals who are hard to convince to take part otherwise.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Response burden and survey participation. Experimental evidence on the effect of interview length on non-response conversion |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/13645579.2025.2537398 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2025.2537398 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Keywords: | Non-response; Non-response, follow-up; Non-response, conversion strategies; next steps; response burden |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10211954 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
