Abstract
Tony Gomes, Ralf Hertwig, and Rick Rosen (2002) "The Impact of
Prompting on Response Rates: Experience with Touchtone Reporting in the
CES Program."
Achieving desired response rates in a timely and cost-effective
manner is a top priority in the Current Employment Statistics (CES)
program. CES is a monthly survey of 250,000 business establishments that
provides estimates of employment, payroll, and hours for the nation,
states, and metropolitan areas. CES uses a number of collection methods.
Touchtone Data Entry (TDE) is the predominant collection method, with
over 60% of the sample. Under TDE, delinquent respondents receive one or
two reminder messages each month. This paper measures the impact of
these messages on response rates. Independent test and control samples
were selected from the TDE respondent population. In one test sample,
the advance notice message was withheld for a five-month period. In the
other test, the nonresponse message was withheld for a five-month
period. Both groups had a parallel control group for comparison. The
results show that prompting respondents twice each month achieves the
highest response rates. Witholding either message reduces the response
rate by 13 percentage points. The paper compares response rates over the
five-month period and explores mode effects associated with different
prompting methods.
Last Modified Date: March 19, 2003
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