Understanding Society: The UK Household Longitudinal Study is now a mixed mode survey, with most adults invited to complete online first, with a face-to-face or telephone follow-up (“web-first”). This mixed-mode design was introduced at Wave 8 (2016-17).

One consequence of this move to online interviewing is that the response rate for the youth (age 10-15) self-completion has fallen dramatically. This is a concern for longitudinal studies where researchers may want to use data from childhood to analyse future outcomes. There is also a risk that non-response to the youth survey will lead to non-response when the sample member is eligible for an adult interview.

When the survey was face-to-face only, youth response rates were around 75-80%. But where the parental interview is done online, the paper youth self-completion questionnaire is sent to the household. This design saw the youth response rate decline to around 55% at Waves 11-13. We instituted a number of changes around the reminder strategy to try and increase youth response rates.

This presentation will explore the effectiveness of inviting young people to complete their annual interview online. This presentation describes the experimentation on Waves 16 and 17 of the Innovation Panel. At IP16 we implemented two experiments: (1) an additional conditional incentive; (2) an information leaflet targeted either at the young person or their parent. At IP17 we implemented a more child-friendly design for the online survey. We experimented with the way in which the young person was invited: the standard way (via a letter addressed to the parent), or with an envelope addressed to the young person included in the letter sent to the parent.

Co-authors

Dr Jonathan Burton, University of Essex