So You Want to Survey a State Legislator? Call Me, Maybe

Abstract

Based on legislation passed in 2021, we undertook a first-in-the-nation effort to survey elected and appointed officials in the state of New Jersey to collect basic demographic information. This survey ran into challenges that all surveys encounter, namely, how to reach respondents and how to get them to then complete the survey—especially with an elite population. An initial recruitment effort using official, and publicly available, email addresses yielded a low response rate, requiring us to revise our recruitment strategy. We settled on directly calling the offices of the New Jersey Assembly and Senate members to enlist the support for their Chiefs of Staff and legislative aides to assist us in getting the survey completed. Directly contacting the offices in this way more than doubled the response rates compared to email. Researchers should be mindful of the benefit of this recruitment mode in future efforts to survey legislators and be attentive to the additional costs and time associated with it.