Improving Response Rates in Telephone Interviews

Abstract

Fewer people are responding to surveys than in the past, which is a problem of urgent importance for social science, government, business and other institutions that depend on this form of data gathering. In this chapter we report a study involving the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), which was begun with a one-third sample of 1957 Wisconsin high school graduates and had follow-up waves in 1965, 1975, 1992 and in 2004. The WLS collects a wide range of economic, familial, health and other information and has been used in many different kinds of studies, most recently about the life course, intergenerational relationships, family functioning, and physical and mental health.²

This research was supported by a grant (#0550705) from the National Science Foundation. The authors gratefully acknowledge Robert M. Hauser, Taissa Hauser and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) for digital data and data collection, which were obtained with support from the National Institute on Aging grants R01AG09775 and P01AG021079. The WLS is supported by National Institute on Aging grant R01 AG0123456, and by core grants to the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (R24 HD047873) and to the Center for Demography of Health and Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (P30 AG017266). We are grateful for able research assistance from Dana Garbarski, Matt Hollander and Jason Nolen. Ceci Ford provided pivotal suggestions on the manuscript.