Following Groves and Heeringa's key paper (JRSS-A, 2006) on responsive designs in surveys, we have implemented several responsive design experiments in a variety of surveys, including a repeated cross-sectional survey, a longitudinal survey, and two RDD telephone surveys. This paper will present an overview of the work, including a discussion of the development of paradata dashboards to monitor survey progress and identify intervention opportunities, and the design and evaluation of responsive design experiments focused on minimizing nonresponse error and survey effort. We will present several case studies to illustrate the process of responsive design and discuss both successes and failures in implementing responsive designs. We conclude with a discussion of lessons learned and implications for different types of surveys.

Keywords: Nonresponse; Survey data collection; Responsive design; Paradata

Biography: James Wagner is an Assistant Research Scientist at the University of Michigan's Survey Research Scientist. He completed his PhD in Survey Methodology at the University of Michigan in 2008. He has worked on surveys for more than 15 years. His interests include survey nonresponse and adaptive survey designs.