An Adaptive Mode Adjustment for Multimode Household Surveys

Abstract

Abstract Multimode data collection has emerged as a common approach for conducting household surveys in the United States. A number of different data collection schemes have been investigated, with an emphasis on collecting as many respondents by the Web prior to going to paper data collection to reduce costs. Despite this, little research has been conducted on the approaches to weighting data from multimode surveys. The typical approach assumes that all respondents should be treated the same regardless of mode even though it is well known that the response patterns by mode vary substantially. We examine an adaptive mode adjustment to address these differences and propose an imbalance measure to help determine the adjustment factor using ideas from responsive design. We then compare the effects of the alternative weighting method in two recent sequential mixed-mode surveys and show it appears to reduce bias while only slightly increasing variances of the estimates.