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Abstract
This article leverages a five-treatment response mode experiment (paper-only, web-only, sequential web-mail, choice, and choice-plus [choice with a promised incentive for responding online]) that was conducted within a nationally representative survey. Because this survey's sample was drawn from respondents to another nationally representative survey, we have rich frame data that includes multiple indicators of comfort using the internet for our sample members and we can compare their response behavior across two surveys. We find that the paper-only treatment yielded a lower response rate than most of the other treatments, but there were not significant differences between the response rates for the other treatments. Among our mixed-mode treatments, the sequential web-mail treatment had the highest percentage of response by web and the lowest cost per response. When focusing on the subgroups that we expected to be the least—and the most—comfortable with the internet, we found that the paper-only treatment generally performed worse than the others, even among subgroups expected not to be comfortable with the internet. We generally did not find significant differences in the effect of response mode treatment on the response rate or percentage of response by web between the subgroups who were the most and least comfortable with the internet. In terms of the consistency of response mode choice over time, our results suggest that some people respond consistently—but also that response mode preferences are weak enough that they can be influenced by the way in which the modes are offered. We ultimately recommend using a sequential web-mail design to minimize costs while still providing people who cannot or will not respond by web with another response mode option. We also find evidence that there may be a growing lack of interest in responding by paper; more research is needed in this area.

AbstractIn theory, offering each sample member the mode sequence that maximizes their response propensity should increase the response rate and/or reduce the amount of nonresponse follow-up relative to a design that offers all sample members the same mode sequence. However, for this sort of tailoring to be feasible in a cross-sectional survey, it must be possible to use data available prior to data collection (e.g., on the sampling frame) to predict sample members' "mode-sensitivity"—the effect of the offered mode sequence on response propensity. Using data from randomized experiments incorporated into the 2016 and 2019 cycles of the National Household Education Survey, we evaluate whether data appended to an address-based sampling (ABS) frame can accurately predict the sensitivity of household-level response behavior to the initial offer of a paper questionnaire instead of a web instrument and whether a modeled-mode design that tailors the offered mode sequence (web-push vs. paper-only) based on the resulting predictions improves household-level data collection outcomes relative to a uniform web-push design. We find that several characteristics available on the ABS frame show statistically significant interactions with the offered mode sequence in determining the probability of response to initial survey mailings. Consequently, relative to a uniform web-push design, the modeled-mode design increased the response rate to early mailings and reduced the number of mailings required per response. However, the modeled-mode design did not meaningfully increase the final response rate, nor did it lead to a substantial reduction in indicators of nonresponse bias.