Linking survey responses with administrative data is a promising practice to increase the range of research questions to be explored, at a limited interview burden, both for respondents and interviewers. We describe the protocol for asking consent to data linkage on nine different sources in a large-scale nationally representative longitudinal survey of young adults in England: the Next Steps Age 25 Survey. We present empirical evidence on consent to data linkage from qualitative interviews, a pilot study, and the mainstage survey. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that discusses the practicalities of implementing a data …

In 2011, a large-scale mixed-mode experiment was linked to the Crime Victimisation Survey (CVS). This experiment consisted of a randomized allocation of sample persons to the four contemporary survey modes Web, mail, telephone and face-to-face, and a follow-up using only interviewer modes. The aim of the experiment was to disentangle mode-specific selection- and measurement bias. In a previous paper (Schouten et al 2013), mode-specific selection and measurement biases were reported for a large number of key variables from the CVS and the Labour Force Survey. This paper is a follow-up to that study and investigates the size of the selection …