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This paper describes the association between an incentive boost and data collection outcomes across two waves of a long-running panel study. In a recent wave, with the aim of achieving response rate goals, all remaining sample members were offered a substantial incentive increase in the final weeks of data collection, despite uncertainty about potential effects on fieldwork outcomes in the following wave. The analyses examine response rates and the average number of interviewer attempts to complete the interview in the waves during and after the incentive boost, and provide an estimate of the cost of the incentives and fieldwork in the waves during and following the boost. The findings provide suggestive evidence that the use of variable incentive strategies from one wave to the next in the context of an ongoing panel study may be an effective strategy to reduce nonresponse and may yield enduring positive effects on subsequent data collection outcomes.

"Nearly 23% of all telephone interviews in the most recently completed wave of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics break off at least once, requiring multiple sessions to complete the interview. Given this high rate, a study was undertaken to better understand the causes and consequences of temporary breakoffs in a computer-assisted telephone interview setting. The majority of studies examining breakoffs have been conducted in the context of self-administered web surveys. The present study uses new paradata collected on telephone interview breakoffs to describe their prevalence, associated field effort, the instrument sections and questions on which they occur, their source - whether respondent-initiated, interviewer-initiated, or related to telephone problems - and associations with respondent and interviewer characteristics. The results provide information about the survey response process and suggest a set of recommendations for instrument design and interviewer training, as well as additional paradata that should be collected to provide more insight into the breakoff phenomenon." (author's abstract)

Abstract
In recent years, household surveys have expended significant effort to counter well-documented increases in direct refusals and greater difficulty contacting survey respondents. A substantial amount of fieldwork effort in panel surveys using telephone interviewing is devoted to the task of contacting the respondent to schedule the day and time of the interview. Higher fieldwork effort leads to greater costs and is associated with lower response rates. A new approach was experimentally evaluated in the 2017 wave of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) Transition into Adulthood Supplement (TAS) that allowed a randomly selected subset of respondents to choose their own day and time of their telephone interview through the use of an online appointment scheduler. TAS is a nationally representative study of US young adults aged 18–28 years embedded within the worlds' longest running panel study, the PSID. This paper experimentally evaluates the effect of offering the online appointment scheduler on fieldwork outcomes, including number of interviewer contact attempts and interview sessions, number of days to complete the interview, and response rates. We describe panel study members' characteristics associated with uptake of the online scheduler and examine differences in the effectiveness of the treatment across subgroups. Finally, potential cost-savings of fieldwork effort due to the online appointment scheduler are evaluated.

Abstract
Adaptive survey designs are increasingly used by survey practitioners to counteract ongoing declines in household survey response rates and manage rising fieldwork costs. This paper reports findings from an evaluation of an early-bird incentive (EBI) experiment targeting high-effort respondents who participate in the 2019 wave of the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We identified a subgroup of high-effort respondents at risk of nonresponse based on their prior wave fieldwork effort and randomized them to a treatment offering an extra time-delimited monetary incentive for completing their interview within the first month of data collection (treatment group; N = 800) or the standard study incentive (control group; N = 400). In recent waves, we have found that the costs of the protracted fieldwork needed to complete interviews with high-effort cases in the form of interviewer contact attempts plus an increased incentive near the close of data collection are extremely high. By incentivizing early participation and reducing the number of interviewer contact attempts and fieldwork days to complete the interview, our goal was to manage both nonresponse and survey costs. We found that the EBI treatment increased response rates and reduced fieldwork effort and costs compared to a control group. We review several key findings and limitations, discuss their implications, and identify the next steps for future research.

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is the world's longest running household panel survey. Since it began in 1968, it has collected data on the same families and their descendants, making it an essential part of America's data infrastructure for empirically based social science research. The PSID arose from the War on Poverty as a tool for evaluating poverty dynamics, and this year (2018) marks 50 years of data collection. Because of its long history and distinctive design of following adult children as they form their own households, the PSID is uniquely positioned to address emerging social and behavioral research questions and related policy issues. This overview presents the design and structural aspects and its evolution over the past 50 years, the successes of the current survey, possible future directions, and the value of using the PSID to understand the challenges facing American families.

It has been well documented that response rates to cross-sectional surveys have declined over the past few decades. It is less clear whether response rates to longitudinal surveys have experienced similar changes over time. This article examines trends in response rates in several major, national longitudinal surveys in the United States and abroad. The authors find that for most of these surveys, the wave-to-wave response rate has not declined. This article also describes the various approaches that these surveys use to minimize attrition. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

It has been well documented that response rates to cross-sectional surveys have declined over the past few decades. It is less clear whether response rates to longitudinal surveys have experienced similar changes over time. This article examines trends in response rates in several major, national longitudinal surveys in the United States and abroad. The authors find that for most of these surveys, the wave-to-wave response rate has not declined. This article also describes the various approaches that these surveys use to minimize attrition.

Split-ballot telephone survey data obtained in 1996 from 1,483 respondents in OR & from a 1996/97 national survey of consumer attitudes (N = 1,329) are used to evaluate the ability of an experimental voter-turnout question to reduce overreporting of voter turnout in surveys. Analysis indicates that the experimental version, which accounts for the influences of social desirability, memory failure, & source monitoring, reduced overreporting in comparison with a standard American National Election Studies question. 3 Tables, 2 Figures, 1 Appendix, 23 References. J. Ferrari