Tuesday 16th July
Wednesday 17th July
Thursday 18th July
Friday 19th July
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Longitudinal surveys – Field logistics in panel studies |
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| Convenor | Dr Jutta Von Maurice (NEPS) |
| Coordinator 1 | Mrs Joanne Corey (Australian Bureau of Statistics) |
The session will cover the organisation of panel studies, from tracking of respondents and sample review prior to field enumeration, the recruitment and training of Interviewers, through to field logistics, field monitoring, and reporting. The focus is on the particular challenges faced by those running panel studies such as:
- Finding effective and reliable tracking methods to find non-contacts and participants with changed life situations from previous waves prior to field enumeration;
- The value of continuing with participants that have been long-term non-contacts or refusals. For sample management and data collection, there is a lot of effort put into these groups, through tracking and interviewer f2f visits, but also a lot of effort goes into this group through instrument design (roll-forward and catch up questions);
- Developing effective engagement strategies aimed at ensuring the long term commitment of respondents of different age groups;
- Conducting standardised Interviewer training across a large interview panel and also conducting of Interviewer training each wave when a significant amount of the content remains stable, yet the Interviewer panel contains a mix of new and experienced Interviewers;
- Regular field logistics, such as starting the field and taking into account that environment and context could have changed since the last field period;
- Monitoring field progress, taking into account the length of the enumeration period, keeping track of refusal and non-contacts, and managing transitions in life paths such as from kindergarten to school or from primary school to secondary school;
- Reporting during enumeration - how often, what to report on, presentation and usefulness of reports.
The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a research infrastructure that collects longitudinal micro data on health, socio-economic status and social and family networks of more than 60,000 individuals aged 50 or over in 20 countries. Data is available free of charge to the global scientific community. SHARE uses a multi-actor design in which the coordinating center, scientific country teams and contracted survey business take on different but highly interconnected responsibilities. During the actual fieldwork of any wave, constant feedback loops between these three groups are necessary to ensure proper data collection. SHARE uses a sophisticated IT infrastructure that allows monitoring key quality indicators of fieldwork by providing constant updates of interview data, contact and other paradata (mostly keystrokes) in real time. This talk will show how progress on contacting respondents and gaining their cooperation was monitored during the recently completed wave four, and how indicators of standardized interviewing (e.g. proper reading of questions) were assessed. This presentation will also outline how we applied the total survey error concept as a guiding scientific principle to try to minimize its different components. Challenges of managing fieldwork and optimizing survey response in a highly decentralized multi-actor environment will be outlined. These included the asynchronicity of fieldwork periods, addressing the principal-agent dilemma and ensuring usefulness, relevance and equivalence of reported statistics to all involved actors. Finally, lessons learned and an outlook of the changes slated for for wave five will be discussed.
The German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) has been set up to find out more about the acquisition of education in Germany, to plot the consequences of education for individual biographies, and to describe central educational processes and trajectories across the entire life span. One of the 6 representative starting cohorts within the NEPS is the cohort of the 9th graders which started in 2010 with a sample of 15,000 students attending schools all over Germany.
In 2013, 4 waves will have been conducted covering the life paths of target persons which will differ greatly when compared to the 1st wave and to one another.
This presentation outlines the general field logistics of the student cohort and ways of dealing with temporary dropouts or changing environments and changing contexts, taking into account the length of the enumeration period.
The National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) is the first national panel study of individuals of all ages in South Africa. It seeks to track respondent livelihood changes over time. Some 30,000 individuals are tracked for face to face interview along with 14,000 co-residents.
The NIDS panel survey environment differs from most national panel surveys in terms of diversity of language (some 11 official languages), challenging infrastructure (roads, power), differing social structures across the country (varying community gatekeepers), variable security (armed robberies, threats of violence and hijackings) and scarce skills.
NIDS' third wave saw fieldwork completed in less than half of the time of previous waves, a higher level of response than the preceding wave and cleaner data going into the data publication phase. In this paper we discuss how the organisation worked with the field company and panel to achieve this. It covers the nature of third party contracting, relationship management, case management, organisational structuring, monitoring and reporting along with panel engagement and contact maintenance. Two key themes of tight integration run through these areas:
Bidirectional technical integration of the enumerator level custom CAPI systems with case management and executive dashboards to giving real time measurements and forecast across a range of quality and quantity measures.
Process integration allowing the in-house and outsourced actors to apply their respective skills and resources to best timely effect in respondent tracking, retention and identification and measurement error.
Finally this paper discusses some of the recent learnings to take forwards.
In this paper we address key issues concerning the successful logistic infrastructure and policies of GSOEP (the German Socio-economic Panel Study), a household longitudinal surves established in 1984.
We focus on the two main areas concerning respondents and interviewers, i.e. the central actors involved in the face-to-face panel survey:
(1) Keeping track of respondents, comprising both, systematic and routinely used efforts as well as ad hoc measures ( e.g. for those respondents who move abroad, or based on non routinised interviewer activities based on long term contacts with households)
(2) f2f field work policies which aim at maximising contact and cooperation rates across household but also within households (to reduce partial unit non response). Here, we will put particuclar emphasis on interviewer steering, including recruitment, training and finally monitoring field work progress.
GSOEP offers an excellent opportunity for a "case illustration" of effective and efficient survey logistics for a panel survey infrastructure whose basic foundations were built already 30 years ago. Compared to less mature panel surveys and due to the quantitative growth and many qualitative innovations within the GSOEP's main sample, but also its more recently established innovation sample (SOEP-IS) and related samples (like e.g. a new household sample for the evaluation of family policies in Germany), GSOEP offers an excellent reference case for discussing the unique challenge of balancing contuinity and adaptive improvement of a long standing survey infrastructure.