In the past there have been many empirical studies dealing with the behavior of respondents in interview situations. Most of these refer to data from surveys and describe an interview situation where respondents and interviewer meet only once. The advantage of this study is the possibility of...

Mobile phone survey interviewing is becoming increasingly prevalent, so it is important to understand how it affects measurement error. We link cognitive response process theory (Tourangeau et al 2000) to theories of mode effects to build a comprehensive framework that identifies ways in which...

We assess whether the probability of a sample member participating at a particular wave of a panel survey is greater if the same interviewer is deployed as at the previous wave. Previous research on this topic mainly uses non-experimental data. Consequently, a) interviewer change is generally...

We conduct two large-scale randomised experiments on the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to study methods of reducing panel attrition. The first experiment compares different strategies for tracing and maintaining contact with sample members. We find that change-of-address cards...

We analyse the results of experiments on aspects of the design of questionnaire and interview mode in the 2009 wave of the new UK Understanding Society panel survey. The randomised experiments relate to job- and life-satisfaction questions and vary the labeling of response scales, the mode of...