Survey Practice December 2009

The December issue of Survey Practice includes two more articles on a salient topic to survey practitioners and pollsters – telephone sampling and data collection. The remaining articles cover topics such as difficult sampling problems, voter registration changes, and event history calendars.

The two articles on telephone sampling analyze the topic from two perspectives. John Boyle and colleagues show that households who consider themselves “cell-mostly” are still likely to answer their landline telephones. Mansour Fahimi and his colleagues provide evidence that a decreasing proportion of households might be included in typical RDD landline surveys.

We also have two articles on some nontraditional sampling methods. Sean Hogan and his colleagues describe some successes and challenges using physicians to refer patients for surveys. Stacy Bieleck and her colleagues describe the challenges of identifying a hard-to-find group – households that are doing homeschooling.

Last month, SP had an article on voting behaviors in California. In this issue, the focus shifts to Pennsylvania and the characteristics of Republicans who changed their voter registration between 2007 and 2008.

Event history calendars can be a challenge for both interviewers and respondents. In the article by Megan Zander Cotugno, she demonstrates a self-administered event history calendar that has been used fairly successfully with limited interviewer support.

List of articles

  • John M. Boyle, Faith Lewis, and Brian Tefft – Cell Phone Mainly Households: Coverage and Reach for Telephone Surveys Using RDD Landline Samples
  • Mansour Fahimi, Dale Kulp, and David Malarek – Topology of the Landline Telephone Sampling Frame
  • Sean O. Hogan, Michael Power, Jay Schulkin, John D. Loft – Referral Sampling: Using Physicians to Recruit Patients
  • Stacey Bielick, Lina Guzman, Astrid Atienza, and Andrew Rivers – Using a Seeded Sample to Measure Response among Homeschooling Households
  • Christopher Borick – Where Have All the Republicans Gone
  • Megan Zander Cotugo – Creating a Self-Administered Event History Calendar

This issue marks the end of the first full year of publishing SP. Looking back, we published more than 40 articles on a wide variety of topics, and included two issues that focused on specific topics – the problems with RDD samples and the uses of non-probability samples. We welcome your comments and suggestions for topics to be included in Survey Practice.

The Editors