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The present report reviews the results of a mailing experiment that took place within a large scale demonstration project. A postcard and stickers were sent to a random group of project participants in the period between a contact call and a survey. The researchers hypothesized that, because of the additional mailing (the treatment), the response rates to the upcoming survey would increase. There was, however, no difference between the response rates of the treatment group that received the additional mailing and the control group. In the specific circumstances of the mailing experiment, sending project participants a postcard and stickers as a reminder of the upcoming survey and of their participation in the pilot project was not an efficient way to increase response rates.

Currently underway, the Québec Population Health Survey (EQSP), for which collection will wrap up in February 2009, provides an opportunity, because of the size of its sample, to assess the impact that sending out introductory letters to respondents has on the response rate in a controlled environment. Since this regional telephone survey is expected to have more than 38,000 respondents, it was possible to use part of its sample for this study without having too great an impact on its overall response rate. In random digit dialling (RDD) surveys such as the EQSP, one of the main challenges in sending out introductory letters is reaching the survey units. Doing so depends largely on our capacity to associate an address with the sample units and on the quality of that information.

This article describes the controlled study proposed by the Institut de la statistique du Québec to measure the effect that sending out introductory letters to respondents had on the survey's response rate.

Based on a representative sample of the Canadian population, this article quantifies the bias resulting from the use of self-reported rather than directly measured height, weight and body mass index (BMI). Associations between BMI categories and selected health conditions are compared to see if the misclassification resulting from the use of self-reported data alters associations between obesity and obesity-related health conditions. The analysis is based on 4,567 respondents to the 2005 Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) who, during a face-to-face interview, provided self-reported values for height and weight and were then measured by trained interviewers. Based on self-reported data, a substantial proportion of individuals with excess body weight were erroneously placed in lower BMI categories. This misclassification resulted in elevated associations between overweight/obesity and morbidity.

This study examined the feasibility of developing correction factors to adjust self-reported measures of Body Mass Index to more closely approximate measured values. Data are from the 2005 Canadian Community Health Survey where respondents were asked to report their height and weight and were subsequently measured. Regression analyses were used to determine which socio-demographic and health characteristics were associated with the discrepancies between reported and measured values. The sample was then split into two groups. In the first, the self-reported BMI and the predictors of the discrepancies were regressed on the measured BMI. Correction equations were generated using all predictor variables that were significant at the p<0.05 level. These correction equations were then tested in the second group to derive estimates of sensitivity, specificity and of obesity prevalence. Logistic regression was used to examine the relationship between measured, reported and corrected BMI and obesity-related health conditions. Corrected estimates provided more accurate measures of obesity prevalence, mean BMI and sensitivity levels. Self-reported data exaggerated the relationship between BMI and health conditions, while in most cases the corrected estimates provided odds ratios that were more similar to those generated with the measured BMI.

In 2006 Statistics New Zealand started developing a strategy aimed at coordinating new and existing initiatives focused on respondent load. The development of the strategy lasted more than a year and the resulting commitment to reduce respondent load has meant that the organisation has had to confront a number of issues that impact on the way we conduct our surveys.

The next challenge for Statistics NZ is the transition from the project based initiatives outlined in the strategy to managing load on an ongoing basis.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has an obligation to measure and annually report on the burden that it places on businesses participating in its surveys. There are also targets for reduction of costs to businesses complying with government regulation as part of the 2005 Administrative Burdens Reduction Project (ABRP) coordinated by the Better Regulation Executive (BRE).

Respondent burden is measured by looking at the economic costs to businesses. Over time the methodology for measuring this economic cost has changed with the most recent method being the development and piloting of a Standard Cost Model (SCM) approach.

The SCM is commonly used in Europe and is focused on measuring objective administrative burdens for all government requests for information e.g. tax returns, VAT, as well as survey participation. This method was not therefore specifically developed to measure statistical response burden. The SCM methodology is activity-based, meaning that the costs and time taken to fulfil requirements are broken down by activity.

The SCM approach generally collects data using face-to-face interviews. The approach is therefore labour intensive both from a collection and analysis perspective but provides in depth information. The approach developed and piloted at ONS uses paper self-completion questionnaires.

The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of respondent burden reporting and targets; and to review the different methodologies that ONS has used to measure respondent burden from the perspectives of sampling, data collection, analysis and usability.

We use a Bayesian method to resolve the boundary solution problem of the maximum likelihood (ML) estimate in an incomplete two-way contingency table, using a loglinear model and Dirichlet priors. We compare five Dirichlet priors in estimating multinomial cell probabilities under nonignorable nonresponse. Three priors among them have been used for an incomplete one-way table, while the remaining two new priors are newly proposed to reflect the difference in the response patterns between respondents and the undecided. The Bayesian estimates with the previous three priors do not always perform better than ML estimates unlike previous studies, whereas the two new priors perform better than both the previous three priors and the ML estimates whenever a boundary solution occurs. We use four sets of data from the 1998 Ohio state polls to illustrate how to use and interpret estimation results for the elections. We use simulation studies to compare performance of the five Bayesian estimates under nonignorable nonresponse.

In this Issue is a column where the Editor biefly presents each paper of the current issue of Survey Methodology. As well, it sometimes contain informations on structure or management changes in the journal.

Researchers are able to examine changes in trends over time, through the examination of responses to repeatedly-asked questions, among the same respondents, over several cycles of longitudinal data. Working with these repeatedly-measured responses can often be challenging. This article examines trends in youth's volunteering activities, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, to highlight several issues that researchers should consider when working with repeated measures.

Dependent interviewing (DI) is used in many longitudinal surveys to "feed forward" data from one wave to the next. Though it is a promising technique which has been demonstrated to enhance data quality in certain respects, relatively little is known about how it is actually administered in the field. This research seeks to address this issue through behavior coding. Various styles of DI were employed in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) in January, 2006, and recordings were made of pilot field interviews. These recordings were analysed to determine whether the questions (particularly the DI aspects) were administered appropriately and to explore the respondent's reaction to the fed-forward data. Of particular interest was whether respondents confirmed or challenged the previously-reported information, whether the prior wave data came into play when respondents were providing their current-wave answers, and how any discrepancies were negotiated by the interviewer and respondent. Also of interest was to examine the effectiveness of various styles of DI. For example, in some cases the prior wave data was brought forward and respondents were asked to explicitly confirm it; in other cases the previous data was read and respondents were asked if the situation was still the same. Results indicate varying levels of compliance in terms of initial question-reading, and suggest that some styles of DI may be more effective than others.

The Participation and Activity Limitation Survey (PALS) is Canada's national survey that gathers information about adults and children whose daily activities are limited by a physical, mental, or other health-related condition or problem.

This report presents a series of tables on the help with everyday activities as well as unmet needs and help providers.

This publication presents a series of tabulations produced from the General Social Survey on time use of Canadians. It includes information on average amounts of time spent on various activities by sex, by age, by selected role groups.

This report presents the results of a pilot survey conducted by Statistics Canada to measure the fuel consumption of on-road motor vehicles registered in Canada. This study was carried out in connection with the Canadian Vehicle Survey (CVS) which collects information on road activity such as distance traveled, number of passengers and trip purpose.

Cycle 15 of the General Social Survey (GSS) is the third cycle to collect detailed information on family life in Canada. The previous GSS cycles that collected family data were Cycles 5 and 10. Topics include demographic characteristics such as age, sex, and marital status; family origin of parents; brothers and sisters; marriages of respondent; common-law unions of respondent; fertility and family intentions; values and attitudes; education history; work history; main activity and other characteristics.

The target population for Cycle 15 of the GSS is all persons 15 years of age and older in Canada, excluding residents of the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut, and full-time residents of institutions.

This table is part of the topic "Ethnocultural Portrait of Canada," which shows 2001 Census data on ethnic groups in Canada, such as their size, geographic location and demographic characteristics. Similar information is available for Canada's visible minority population.

Data on the socio-economic characteristics of these populations will be available at a later date. As well, data on religions in Canada will be available in May 2003.

Additional information on ethnocultural diversity will be available from the Ethnic Diversity Survey in the summer of 2003.

This table can be found in the Topic Bundle: Ethnocultural Portrait of Canada, 2001 Census, Catalogue No. 97F0010XCB2001000.

It is also possible to subscribe to all the day-of-release bundles. For more information, refer to Catalogue No. 97F0023XCB.

This table is available FREE on the Internet, Catalogue No. 97F0010XIE2001001.

The National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY), developed jointly by Human Resources Development Canada and Statistics Canada, is a comprehensive survey which follows the development of children in Canada and paints a picture of their lives. The survey monitors children's development and measures the incidence of various factors that influence their development, both positively and negatively.

Cycle 13 of the General Social Survey (GSS) is the third cycle (following cycles 3 and 8) that collected information in 1999 on the nature and extent of criminal victimisation in Canada. Focus content for cycle 13 addressed two areas of emerging interest: public perception toward alternatives to imprisonment; and spousal violence and senior abuse. Other subjects common to all three cycles include perceptions of crime, police and courts; crime prevention precautions; accident and crime screening sections; and accident and crime incident reports. The target population of the GSS is all individuals aged 15 and over living in a private household in one of the ten provinces.

The National Population Health Survey (NPHS) program is designed to collect information related to the health of the Canadian population. The first cycle of data collection began in 1994. The institutional component includes long-term residents (expected to stay longer than six months) in health care facilities with four or more beds in Canada with the principal exclusion of the Yukon and the Northwest Teritories. The document has been produced to facilitate the manipulation of the 1996-1997 microdata file containing survey results. The main variables include: demography, health status, chronic conditions, restriction of activity, socio-demographic, and others.

Information in this microdata file refers to survey data collected in September - November, 1994 for persons 15 years of age and older in Canada's ten provinces. The survey's main data objectives were to measure the prevalence and patterns of alcohol and other drug use, to assess harm and other consequences of drug use and to evaluate trends in recent patterns of use. Canada's Alcohol and Other Drugs Survey (CADS) also updates and expands upon data collected in the first survey, the National Alcohol and Other Drugs Survey (NADS), conducted in 1989.

Cycle 11 collected data from persons 15 years and older and concentrated on help given or received during temporary difficult times or out of necessity due to long-term health or physical limitations in daily activities either inside or outside the household. The target population of the General Social Survey consisted of all individuals aged 15 and over living in a private household in one of the ten provinces.

This population-based analysis uses data from the 2007/2008 Canadian Community Health Survey to provide estimates of the prevalence of chronic pain by socio-demographic characteristics for a sample of respondents aged 12 to 44.

In 2009, as part of its General Social Survey program, Statistics Canada conducted a survey on victimization and public perceptions of crime and the justice system. It was the fifith time that the General Social Survey (GSS) had examined victimization - previous surveys were conducted in 2004, 1999, 1993 and 1988.

For the 2009 survey, interviews were conducted by telephone with approximately 19,500 respondents, aged 15 and older, living in the 10 provinces. Respondents were asked about their experiences with criminal victimization. Those respondents who had been victims of a crime in the previous 12 months were asked for detailed information on each incident, including when and where it occurred; whether the incident was reported to the police; and how they were affected by the experience.

This Juristat explores the overall trends and regional variations of criminal victimization, as well as the individual risk factors associated with victimization.

On behalf of Statistics Canada, I would like to welcome you all, friends and colleagues, to Symposium 2008. This the 24th International Symposium organized by Statistics Canada on survey methodology.

This paper addresses the efforts of the U.S. Energy Information Administration to design, test and implement new and substantially redesigned surveys. The need to change EIA's surveys has become increasingly important, as U.S. energy industries have moved from highly regulated to deregulated business. This has substantially affected both their ability and willingness to report data. The paper focuses on how EIA has deployed current tools for designing and testing surveys and the reasons that these methods have not always yielded the desired results. It suggests some new tools and methods that we would like to try to improve the quality of our data.

In a survey where results were estimated by simple averages, we will compare the effect on the results of a follow-up among non-respondents, and weighting based on the last ten percents of the respondents. The data used are collected from a Survey of Living Conditions among Immigrants in Norway that was carried out in 2006.

As survey researchers attempt to maintain traditionally high response rates, reluctant respondents have resulted in increasing data collection costs. This respondent reluctance may be related to the amount of time it takes to complete an interview in large-scale, multi-purpose surveys, such as the National Survey of Recent College Graduates (NSRCG). Recognizing that respondent burden or questionnaire length may contribute to lower response rates, in 2003, following several months of data collection under the standard data collection protocol, the NSRCG offered its nonrespondents monetary incentives about two months before the end of the data collection,. In conjunction with the incentive offer, the NSRCG also offered persistent nonrespondents an opportunity to complete a much-abbreviated interview consisting of a few critical items. The late respondents who completed the interviews as the result of the incentive and critical items-only questionnaire offers may provide some insight into the issue of nonresponse bias and the likelihood that such interviewees would have remained survey nonrespondents if these refusal conversion efforts had not been made.

In this paper, we define "reluctant respondents" as those who responded to the survey only after extra efforts were made beyond the ones initially planned in the standard data collection protocol. Specifically, reluctant respondents in the 2003 NSRCG are those who responded to the regular or shortened questionnaire following the incentive offer. Our conjecture was that the behavior of the reluctant respondents would be more like that of nonrespondents than of respondents to the surveys. This paper describes an investigation of reluctant respondents and the extent to which they are different from regular respondents. We compare different response groups on several key survey estimates. This comparison will expand our understanding of nonresponse bias in the NSRCG, and of the characteristics of nonrespondents themselves, thus providing a basis for changes in the NSRCG weighting system or estimation procedures in the future.

Telephone Data Entry (TDE) is a system by which survey respondents can return their data to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) using the keypad on their telephone and currently accounts for approximately 12% of total responses to ONS business surveys. ONS is currently increasing the number of surveys which use TDE as the primary mode of response and this paper gives an overview of the redevelopment project covering; the redevelopment of the paper questionnaire, enhancements made to the TDE system and the results from piloting these changes. Improvements to the quality of the data received and increased response via TDE as a result of these developments suggest that data quality improvements and cost savings are possible as a result of promoting TDE as the primary mode of response to short term surveys.

Increasingly, children of all ages are becoming respondents in survey interviews. While juveniles are considered to be reliable respondents for many topics and survey settings it is unclear to what extend younger children provide reliable information in a face-to-face interview. In this paper we will report results from a study using video captures of 205 face-to-face interviews with children aged 8 through 14. The interviews have been coded using behavior codes on a question by question level which provides behavior-related indicators regarding the question-answer process. In addition, standard tests of cognitive resources have been conducted. Using visible and audible problems in the respondent behavior, we are able to assess the impact of the children's cognitive resources on respondent behaviors. Results suggest that girls and boys differ fundamentally in the cognitive mechanisms leading to problematic respondent behaviors.

Statistics Netherlands (SN) has been using electronic questionnaires for Business surveys since the early nineties. Some years ago SN decided to invest in a large scale use of electronic questionnaires. The big yearly production survey of about 80 000 forms, divided over many different economical activity areas, was redesigned using a meta database driven approach. The resulting system is able to generate non-intelligent personalized PDF forms and intelligent personalized Blaise forms. The Blaise forms are used by a new tool in the Blaise system which can be downloaded by the respondents from the SN web site to run the questionnaire off-line. Essential to the system is the SN house style for paper and electronic forms. The flexibility of the new tool offered the questionnaire designers the possibility to implement a user friendly form according to this house style.

Part of the implementation is an audit trail that offers insight in the way respondents operate the questionnaire program. The entered data including the audit trail can be transferred via encrypted e-mail or through the internet to SN. The paper will give an outline of the overall system architecture and the role of Blaise in the system. It will also describe the results of using the system for several years now and some results of the analysis of the audit trail.

In a multi-divisional initiative within the U. S. Census Bureau, a highly sophisticated and innovative system was developed and implemented for the capturing, tracking, and scanning of respondent data that implements Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Optical Mark Recognition (OMR), and keying technology with heavy emphasis on error detection and control. The system, known as the integrated Computer Assisted Data Entry (iCADE) System, provides digital imaging of respondent questionnaires which are then processed by a combination of imaging algorithms, sent through Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) to collect check box data, and automatically collect and send only write-in areas to data-keying staff for the data capture process. These capabilities have produced great efficiencies in the data capture process and have led to a novel and efficient approach to post-collection activities.

The paper examines the results of an initial evaluation of the effectiveness of the lighter, non-bureaucratic approach to questionnaire design called the SLID (Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics ) Notebook

This report presents the results of the May 1993 Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) test as they relate to the wealth items, at the individual level and at the family level.

This paper examines the issues and the procedures designed to maintain a representative sample of the population for the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID).

This paper describes the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) following rules, which govern who is traced and who is interviewed. It also outlines the conceptual basis for these procedures.

This report presents general observations of the first annual Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) income interview by members of the head office project team. It also gives a summary of responses from a subset of interviewers who were asked to complete a debriefing questionnaire after completing SLID collection.

This research paper represents a reference guide for the contact and demographic modules of the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID).

This paper presents comments from a sample of interviewers from each regional office who were selected to complete a debriefing questionnaire to evaluate the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) 1995 income interview.