Additional Effort to Collect Contact Information in an Establishment Survey

One challenge in establishment surveys is the identification of an appropriate respondent who must have the authority, capacity, and motivation to complete the survey request. Though sampling frames often contain general contact information about the establishment (e.g., mailing address and telephone number), they typically do not contain respondent-specific information. Given the need to identify the correct respondent within an establishment, it may be worthwhile to devote resources to updating and verifying frame contact information. This experiment examines the impact of placing a telephone call to sampled establishments to collect respondent contact information prior to sending the survey invitation. The results show that the additional effort results in a large increase in the percentage of establishments that provided updated contact information.