Survey Practice April 2010

Call for Papers

Many articles in Survey Practice started as AAPOR annual meeting presentations. We invite all AAPOR presenters to consider submitting their AAPOR presentations to Survey Practice. We would especially welcome multi- and mixed-mode articles for a special issue in October.

April Issue

Survey Practice has published numerous articles on telephone survey samples and in this issue, an article by Martin Barron and his colleagues presents more information on the changes in RDD samples. The article is a third view about the impact of excluding 0-bank telephone numbers in RDD samples that is somewhat between two earlier articles in Survey Practice by Monsour Fahimi and his colleagues and John Boyle and his colleagues.

This issue has two articles that describe methods used to maintain participants in longitudinal studies. Anne Kenyon and her colleagues tested the use of incentives and a mail questionnaire to increase response in a multi-wave telephone survey. Geraldine Mooney and her colleagues tested the use of prefills from previous years to reduce burden in the web version of an annual survey.

The article by Kay Axhausen and Claude Weis shows how a response burden indicator (essentially the number and types of questions) can be used to predict response rates. In the past, Survey Practice has published similar articles on methods to predict survey outcomes. If you have used any of the articles to attempt to predict costs, response, or data quality, we would be glad to consider such contributions.

One topic that has not been covered in SP is the use of paradata to improve survey data quality. In this issue, Peter Lynn and Gerry Nicolaas summarize the papers from a recent workshop on the use of paradata. More papers on the use of paradata are welcomed.

Jamie Paul and Sarah Grady attended the sessions on address-based samples at last year’s AAPOR annual meeting and summarized the presentations. We would like to invite students who attend this year’s AAPOR annual meeting to pick a “hot” topic, attend the sessions, and summarize the findings. We would try to publish the summaries in the June and August issues.

For the second year, Mario Callegaro has accumulated a list of books on public opinion and survey research published in the past year. If you know of others, please add them to the “comments” under the list.

Articles

More on the Extent of Undercoverage in RDD Telephone Surveys Due to the Omission of 0-BanksArticles
Martin Barron, Jenny Kelly, Robert Montgomery, James Singleton, Hee-Choon Shin, Benjamin Skalland, Xian Tao, and Kirk Wolter

Testing Prepaid Incentives and a Mail Questionnaire to Increase Response in a Multi-Wave Telephone Survey
Anne Kenyon, Lynn Newman, Suzanne Triplett, Anne-Marie Knokey, Kathryn Valdes, and Helen Smith

Does Prefilling Questions in a Longitudinal Survey Encourage Participation?
Geraldine M. Mooney, Melissa Krakowiecki, and Deborah Trunzo

Predicting response rate: A natural experiment
Kay W. Axhausen, Claude Weis

Making Good Use of Survey Paradata
Peter Lynn, University of Essex and Gerry Nicolaas

Summary of Address Based Sampling papers from 2009 AAPOR Conference
Jamie Paul and Sarah Grady

Recent Books in Public Opinion, Survey Methods, and Survey Statistics
Mario Callegaro

The Editors