Many surveys have changed modes because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Surveys using mailed letters and/or reminders may have been adversely affected by staff shortages affecting the delivery times of the United States Postal Service (USPS). In this study, we analysed daily USPS mail delivery reports for each of 21 National Distribution Centers (NDCs) for two specific mailings that were sent to a national probability sample of addresses in 2020. We linked concurrent aggregate rates of COVID-19 infection and mortality to each of the NDCs and examined the variability in cumulative delivery rates across the NDCs as a function of these …

The Healthy Chicago Survey (HCS) is a self-administered, multimode survey conducted annually on a random sample of Chicagoans aged 18 years or older. The survey uses an address-based sampling frame and offers both web and paper modes, with a Choice+ data collection protocol offering a higher promised incentive for completing by web. Overall, about 90% of individuals take the HCS via web. Sampled households are sent a series of mailings inviting the adult who is next to celebrate a birthday to complete the survey. In the 2023 HCS administration, an experiment was fielded in which half of the mailings contained …

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ’s) annual Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) collects data on Americans’ health care expenditures and use. In seeking to understand connections between these topics and social determinants of health, AHRQ and Westat conducted a new MEPS supplemental study in 2021 using a multimode (web and paper) instrument. All other MEPS supplements had been administered only as paper questionnaires. Due to sensitive questions, participants were encouraged to complete the web survey, but had the option of responding by paper. Response was encouraged through a multimode contact strategy, including text messages, emails, and/or mailings. This …

This study is devoted to an analysis of presentation format differences in factorial survey experiments by the example of fear of crime as conceptualized by criminological theories. Guided by approaches from the psychology of cognition, we aim at a systematic comparison of the processing of factorial survey experiments based either on written or visual vignettes. We conducted a cross-sectional web survey in 2014 among n = 1.449 students of a German university. Within the framework of a split ballot-experiment, we varied the presentation format of vignettes which were part of a factorial survey experiment. The results of our study show …

In self-administered web and paper mode surveys, the Choice+ protocol, which offers both modes concurrently but with a differentially higher incentive for responding by web, has been shown to increase the share of responses obtained by web and to increase response rates overall relative to a concurrent design with equal incentive amounts. This protocol was initially adopted for the 2020 Healthy Chicago Survey. After observing fewer than 20% of the 2020 completes coming via paper, however, an experiment was fielded in the 2021 administration to evaluate a sequential variant of the Choice+ protocol in which the paper mode was only …