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Procedures and Measures for Further Research 67
demographics, from households that were more difficult to contact. Although this research was
able to confirm characteristics of non-respondents found in other work, it was not possible to
draw any definitive conclusions about how many refusals/non-contacts should be converted for
every call attempt to reduce the overall incidence of bias in data set. It is recommended this issue
be examined in greater depth in the future. It is suggested that multiple call-history files be ana-
lyzed as part of any future research effort. One of the main difficulties in comparing different call
history files is that disposition codes are inconsistently defined among travel surveys. In light of
this, it is suggested that future analysis should use files from contemporary surveys that are able
to adopt the definitions proposed in this project.
4.3.8 Effect of Interview Mode on Recruitment
and Non-Response Rates
The effect of interview mode on recruitment and non-response rates is related to the section
on personalized interview techniques, Section 4.3.3, except that the focus is different. In this case,
the issue is whether different modes of survey will have different impacts on recruitment rates
and on eventual non-response rates. The same experiment probably could be conducted for
this as would be envisaged for Section 4.3.3. However, the difference in this case will be that the
focus is on whether different interview modes used in recruitment are associated with signifi-
cantly different recruitment rates and what effect the different modes have on actual completion
rates for the survey.
4.3.9 Unknown Eligibility Rates
In defining standardized procedures for computing response rates, the issue of the estimated
rate of eligibility for those contacts that remained with unknown eligibility was recommended as
being left to the survey firm. However, better guidance would be preferred for this issue because
it has a critical impact on the calculation of response rates. Effectively, this requires the acquisi-
tion of a number of additional call-history files from which analysis can be conducted on the eli-
gibility rates at different points in the calling. Ideally, these files should be obtained from surveys
that have used 10 or more calls as the limit for trying to recruit households so that it is possible to
determine an eligibility rate for a 5-call limit from information obtained from calls made beyond
the fifth attempt.
4.3.10 Data Archiving in Transportation
In this report, we have proposed standardized procedures for data archiving for household
travel surveys (see Section 2.6.4). However, past transportation surveys have not been archived
according to the standards. The research that is needed is to archive data, using the standardized
procedures, and then test the usefulness and effectiveness of the archiving. This may then result
in modifications to the proposed procedures.
