Getting to the top: Reaching wealthy respondents in the SCF

Abstract

This paper examines the effort devoted to securing interviews with a very wealthy part of the sample for the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Only about a quarter of the group completed an interview. At the close of the field period, more than a third of this part of the sample was judged by the field staff to be still workable—that is, those cases were neither complete nor final refusals. The evolution of the field work was driven both by the behavior of respondents and the behavior of the field staff. The paper uses the formal data coded in the call records for each case to describe the work. But that information is inconclusive about the factors that drove the work. However, informal notes in the call records do provide a clear picture of the points of resistance among respondents. Although it was difficult to locate, contact, and convince respondents of the legitimacy and value of the survey, it appears that the ultimate constraint in a large proportion of cases was the length of the interview—potentially several hours for these respondents. Examination of the available auxiliary data provides little evidence of nonresponse bias.