Tuesday March 29th 2011, 16.00 - 17.15, Arthur Lewis Building, Board Room, 2.17, University of Manchester.

Tea and coffee at 15.45

Joint meeting with Manchester University's CCSR, ISC and the RSS Manchester Local Group

Theme: Ways of managing survey non-response

Mick P. Couper (Survey Research Center, University of Michigan)
Adaptive Designs for Managing Survey Nonresponse 

I will present work that my colleagues and I are doing using adaptive survey design in the National Survey of Family Growth, a continuous survey with quarterly samples. Each quarter is divided into two phases of data collection, with subsampling of nonrespondents in the second phase. We track the survey paradata on a daily basis and execute planned interventions to address sample balance issues and potential bias. Some of these interventions are randomized experiments. In this talk, I will describe the process of adaptive survey design, present results of our work, and discuss the benefits of this approach both for controlling costs and for managing nonresponse error in surveys. I will also briefly describe the extension of this approach to other types of surveys, such as the longitudinal Health and Retirement Study.

(Ian Plewis is indisposed)