This study examined the effects of advance letters on individual participation in the 2018 round of the European Social Survey in Ireland. As participation rates in household surveys have been in decline in many countries, understanding the impact of engagement strategies, such as prior contact, are crucial for fieldwork planning and overall quality of data collection. Based on a natural experiment, we assessed the likelihood of individuals to take part in the survey comparing those who have received an advance letter with those who did not receive it. Contrary to previous evidence on the effectiveness of prior contact, our results …

The phenomenon of declining response rates is a major challenge for empirical social research. Should the loss of response units be non-random, population estimates may become biased. A rising share of the “unreachable” may lead to an increased probability of non-randomness of the loss. Exploring the process is therefore crucial to understanding what can be expected of our achieved samples. In a recent study, we investigated patterns of response unit loss by conducting a lagged recontact survey based on the European Social Survey (ESS) Round 8. We found that before one arrives at a premature verdict of unreachability, it is …

Response rates are declining increasing the risk of nonresponse error. The reasons for this decline are multiple: the rise of online surveys, mobile phones, and information requests, societal changes, greater awareness of privacy issues, etc. To combat this decline, fieldwork efforts have become increasingly intensive: widespread use of respondent incentives, advance letters, and an increased number of contact attempts. In addition, complex fieldwork strategies such as adaptive call scheduling or responsive designs have been implemented. The additional efforts to counterbalance nonresponse complicate the measurement of the increased difficulty of contacting potential respondents and convincing them to cooperate. To observe developments …