The Maintaining high response rates is it worth the effort? event was held at the Royal Statistical Society, London on the 3rd March 2016. The seminar focused on the issue of ever more challenging effort to maintain high response rates. Data collection agencies are allocating large shares of available resources to repeated callback attempts at addresses until contact is made, and engaging in refusal conversion strategies to persuade initially uncooperative households to undertake an interview. This seminar explored whether the focus on maintaining high response rates is worth the effort, or whether we might tolerate lower response rates.
The event was opened by Professor Patrick Sturgis, director of the National Centre for Research Methods (University of Southampton). Professor Sturgis summarised the trends in response rates going down, increasing cost and cost drivers and introduced a study on this topic. Dr Gabriele Durrant (University of Southampton) presented a report on assessing dataset representativeness during survey data collection which featured evidence from the 2011 Census Non-Response Link Study and Joel Williams (TNS-BMRB) focused on the impact of response maximisation strategies on under-represented sub-populations.
Video from the event can be accessed here.