Optimizing Data Collection Interventions to Balance Cost and Quality in a Sequential Multimode Survey

Abstract High-quality survey data collection is getting more expensive to conduct because of decreasing response rates and rising data collection costs. Responsive and adaptive designs have emerged as a framework for targeting and reallocating resources during the data collection period to improve survey data collection efficiency. Here, we report on the implementation and evaluation of a responsive design experiment in the National Survey of College Graduates that optimizes the cost-quality tradeoff by minimizing a function of data collection costs and the root mean squared error of a key survey measure, self-reported salary. We used a Bayesian framework to incorporate prior information and generate predictions of estimated response propensity, self-reported salary, and data collection costs for use in our optimization rule. At three points during the data collection process, we implement the optimization rule and identify cases for which reduced effort would have minimal effect on the mean squared error (RMSE) of mean self-reported salary while allowing us to reduce data collection costs. We find that this optimization process allowed us to reduce data collection costs by nearly 10 percent, without a statistically or practically significant increase in the RMSE of mean salary or a decrease in the unweighted response rate. This experiment demonstrates the potential for these types of designs to more effectively target data collection resources to reach survey quality goals.