A time-consuming part of the organization of empirical field research is the arrangement of appointments with individual participants. Often times part of the sample is hard to reach via phone. An online appointment system to facilitate the coordination of the annual family visits was tested within the scope of a German educational panel study in 2012. The participants had the opportunity to arrange their appointment online in accordance with their own scheduling needs. Roughly one quarter (n = 63) of our sample of 242 families, who had thus far been used to arranging their appointments by phone, chose the online …