Fieldwork monitoring in telephone surveys

Abstract

Introduction: In Germany, the telephone as a mode is still most commonly used for collecting quantitative data in empirical market and social research (e.g. www.adm-ev.de). Although a number of problems - such as declining response rates (e.g. Curtin et al. 2005) and a constantly changing telecommunications market - make it necessary to try out new access routes (e.g. online surveys), and although these are increasingly being used, there is a lack of methods for generating samples for representative online surveys (Faas 2003, Couper and Coutts 2006, AAPOR 2010). While online surveys are a quick and inexpensive instrument (for example, for questioning the members of an access panel), telephone and randomly generated samples for telephone surveys still play an important role for low-cost, population-based representative surveys.