ABSTRACT

For hard-to-survey populations such as ethnic minorities and immigrants, increasing survey response rates is a crucial element of the fieldwork as these populations often show a higher likelihood of not participating compared with the native population. However, no study has so far compared different strategies for mobilisation within this group. Using data from the Immigrant German Election Study II, this experiment systematically compares the effects of home visits and postal reminders for the mobilisation of immigrant-origin non-respondents (i.e. persons classified as being from Turkey or from the former Soviet Union and its successor states) from a randomly drawn sample regarding the likelihood of participation in the first wave, signing up for a multi-wave panel, and taking part in all three panel waves. Multivariate analyses show that those in the treated home-visit group were more likely to take part in all stages of the survey design. Even though costs are higher than conventional postal reminders, home visits might be a useful strategy for cases in which increasing the response rate is an important goal, given a fixed, small number of potential respondents.

摘要

对于少数民族和移民等难以调查的人群，提高调查回复率是实地调查的一个关键因素，因为与本地人口相比，这些人群通常表现出更高的不参与的可能性。然而，到目前为止，还没有研究比较该群体中不同的动员策略。使用德国移民选举研究 II 的数据，该实验系统地比较了家访和邮政提醒对动员移民原籍未答复者（即被归类为来自土耳其或前苏联及其后继国家的人）的影响) 从随机抽取的样本中抽取关于参与第一波、注册多波小组以及参加所有三个小组的可能性的样本。多变量分析表明，那些接受过治疗的家访组更有可能参与调查设计的所有阶段。尽管成本高于传统的邮寄提醒，但对于固定的、少量的潜在受访者来说，提高回复率是一个重要目标的情况下，家访可能是一种有用的策略。