Contacts

Contacts are a broad set of survey dispositions that are used with all surveys (telephone, in-person, Internet, and mail), regardless of mode. The set of contact dispositions includes all the kinds of contacts a survey or interviewer (depending on the mode) might make with a person or sampled household or unit.

Many of the most common types of contacts occur in all surveys, regardless of the mode in which they are conducted. These include completed interviews, partial interviews, refusals, and breakoffs. Other, less common types of contacts include cases in which contact is made with a respondent or sampled unit or household but an interview is never started because the sampled respondent is physically or mentally unable to participate, or an interviewer is told the respondent is unavailable to complete the questionnaire during the entire field period. Contacts also include cases involving language barriers (with a telephone or in-person survey) and literacy issues relating to respondents not being able to read and understand the questionnaire, in the case of mail and Internet surveys. A final type of contact occurs when it is determined that the person or household is ineligible for the survey. Of note, in many cases in mail and Internet surveys, the researcher has no idea whether or not contact ever was made with anyone at the sampling unit.

Contacts are used for computing contact rates for surveys. A contact rate measures the proportion of all cases in the sampling pool in which a member of a sampled household was reached by an interviewer (in telephone and in-person surveys) or received the survey request (in the case of mail and Internet surveys).