Can we understand persons’ postponement in web surveys? Results from communication experiments in the Netherlands.
At Statistics Netherlands, we experienced a decline in response rates on social surveys, similar to other National Statistical Institutes (NSIs). In this paper we reflect on the general research question that investigates the effect of different types of procrastination on response behavior within the Dutch Labor Force Survey (LFS). The hypothesis is that procrastinating, not only leads to late-responding but ultimately to non-response due to lack of motivation. The first experiment focused on the position of the call to action in the design of the advance letters, second we tested the effect of mentioning a fictional deadline in the advance …

