Evaluation of respondents' participation in the survey of Information and Communication Technologies usage in Enterprises (ICT)

We propose a longitudinal analysis with a point of view connected to the organizational changes that have taken place in the Italian National Institute of Statistics in recent years. In 2016 the Institute introduced a new Directorate, intending to standardize and generalize the business process of Data Collection according to the European standard of the GAMSO model. The paper discusses the pros and cons of this change from the perspective of the survey's participation. The ICT survey response rate analysis demonstrates an increase of around 20% since the beginning of the new organization: the paper tries to focus on the impact of the changes introduced with the new organization. We focused our attention on two specific subsets of respondents - the so-called "wanted" - the ones who have never answered to an ICT survey or to any other Istat survey and - the so-called “lost” - the ones included in two consecutive survey’s samples and that answered in the previous edition but not in the current one. The paper aims to illustrate how an efficient organization of data collection reflects its benefits on survey results and what kind of actions should be taken to catch the attention of the "wanted". Finally, we apply a logistic model measuring the probability that an enterprise responding in 2018 (t-1) also answered in 2019 (t). All the analysis suggests some actions that could be taken to improve respondents' participation, data quality, and respondents' perception of the official statistics.

Key Words: data collection strategy, response rate, paradata, response burden, ICT Survey.