Contact Rate

Contact rate measures the proportion of eligible cases in the sampling pool in which a member of a sampled household was contacted—that is, reached by an interviewer (in telephone and in-person surveys) or received the survey request (in the case of mail and Internet surveys). Contact rates can be computed for all surveys, regardless of the mode in which the data are gathered. The contact rate is a survey outcome rate that can be cited in survey reports and in research literature. Although no single rate or number can reflect the total quality of a survey, contact rates (along with survey response rates, survey cooperation rates, and survey refusal rates) are one of the most common outcome tools that researchers use to evaluate survey quality.

Both household-level and respondent-level contact rates can be computed for a survey by using the final sample dispositions. In the former case, the household-level contact rate reflects the proportion of cases in which any sort of contact was made with a person at a household, including cases in which contact was made with eligible respondents. The respondent-level contact rate is similar, with the exception that it reflects only the proportion of contacts with known survey respondents. Researchers typically compute 1 of 3 standard contact rates.