Each year, Understanding Society collects data about life events experienced since the previous interview in domains such as employment, training, partnerships, and fertility. The information that can be collected retrospectively is, however, limited to information respondents can recall accurately and to objective information that does not change with the passage of time. This paper reports on experiments with monthly Life Event data collection in the Innovation Panel. Following a first round of testing in 2020, we are about to field a second phase of experiments. Each month, sample members will be asked whether they have experienced any of a list of life events in the past calendar month. If no, this will be the end of the survey. If yes, they will be asked follow-up questions, focusing on expectations, attitudes and subjective information that cannot be collected retrospectively. The monthly survey will be implemented as a web survey, with invitations sent by email, SMS, or letter, depending on the contact information that we have. The aim of this trial is to test different fieldwork protocols that make it as easy as possible for sample members to access and complete the monthly surveys. We will experiment with methods to motivate sample members to participate (incentivising run-streaks of uninterrupted monthly participation, offering different types of incentives), methods to ensure sample members see the monthly survey invitations and recognise them as legitimate (asking respondents for their preferred mode of contact for the survey invitations, including screenshots of the SMS invitations in the advance letter about the study), and making it as easy as possible for them to access the survey (including QR codes in the survey invitations, embedding the initial question directly in the invitation email). We will report on the effects of experimental treatments on survey participation rates and representativeness of participants.

Co-authors

Dr Jonathan Burton; Jim Vine, University of Essex;

Professor Mick Couper, University of Michigan