Survey organisations often attempt to convert sample members who refuse to take part in a survey. Persuasive techniques are used in an effort to get the refusers to change their mind and agree to an interview. This is done in order to improve response rate and, possibly, to reduce non-response...

This paper documents the introduction of dependent interviewing in wave 16 of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). Dependent interviewing is a method of designing questions on longitudinal surveys where substantive information, available to the survey organisation prior to the interview,...

Using new data from the Understanding Society: COVID 19 survey collected in April 2020, we show how the aggregate shock caused by the pandemic affects individuals across the distribution. The survey collects data from existing members of the Under-standing Society panel survey who have been...

Incentives in the form of a gift or money are given to survey respondents in the hope that this will increase response rates and possibly also reduce non-response bias. They can also act as a means of thanking respondents for taking part and showing appreciation for the time the respondent has...

We conduct two large-scale randomised experiments on the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to study methods of reducing panel attrition. The first experiment compares different strategies for tracing and maintaining contact with sample members. We find that change-of-address cards...

Using an experimental design, we compare two alternative approaches to dependent interviewing (proactive and reactive) with traditional independent interviewing on a module of questions about sources of income. We believe this to be the first large-scale quantitative comparison of proactive and...

This report derives from the project ?Improving survey measurement of income and employment (ISMIE)? which investigates measurement error in survey data on income and employment, using a UK sub-sample of the European Household Community Panel (ECHP). In this paper we describe the process of...

Linkages of household survey responses with administrative data may be based on unique individual identifiers or on survey respondent characteristics. The benefits gained from using unique identifiers need to be assessed in the light of potential problems such as non-response and measurement...

We analyse consent patterns and consent bias in the context of a large general household survey, the ?Improving survey measurement of income and employment? (ISMIE) survey, also addressing issues that arise when there are multiple consent questions. Using a multivariate probit regression model...