General declines in survey response rates and rising costs of interviewer fieldwork, together with technological advances in survey data collection, among other factors, have led many social surveys to transition, or consider transitioning, from interviewer-administered to self-completion surveys. The pace of this transition was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The absence of field interviewers in self-completion surveys presents several challenges for the random selection of respondents within households when individual-level sampling frames are unavailable, as the responsibility for selection rests with sampled households themselves, and this has raised debates about how best to select individuals within households.
This workshop will present research conducted as part of Research Strand 4: Surveys without field interviewers of the Survey Futures project, focusing specifically on ‘within-household selection methods.’ In this workshop, we will provide an overview of currently available methods and present findings from an experimental study that compared the relative effectiveness of two common within-household selection methods: the ‘any two’ method (non-random with potential cost advantages) and the next-birthday method (quasi-random). We will also summarise evidence from the literature on the performance of different selection methods and current practices used in the UK, and present recommendations for survey practice for self-completion surveys.
Programme:
14:00 – 14:05: Welcome and Introductions (Peter Lynn, University of Essex, UK)
14:05 – 14:20: Overview of currently available methods for within-household selection(Peter Lynn, University of Essex, UK)
14:20 – 14:50: Assessing methods for within-household selection in self-administered push-to-web surveys: an experimental comparison (Nathan Reece – European Social Survey, City St George’s University, London, UK)
14:50 – 15:30: Best practices for selecting individuals within households in self-completion surveys (Nhlanhla Ndebele – European Social Survey, City St George’s University, London, UK)
15:30 – 16:00: Q&A session and discussion
1600: End