The Impact of Using the Web in a Mixed-Mode Follow-up of a Longitudinal Birth Cohort Study: Evidence from the National Child Development Study

Abstract

A sequential mixed-mode data collection, online-totelephone, was introduced into the National Child Development Study for the first time at the study's age 55 sweep in 2013. The study included a small experiment, whereby a randomised subset of study members was allocated to a single mode, telephone-only interview, in order to test for the presence of mode effects on participation and measurement. Relative to telephone-only, the offer of the Web increased overall participation rates by 5.0 percentage points (82.8% vs. 77.8%; 95% confidence interval for difference: 2.7% to 7.3%). Differences attributable to mode of interview were detected in levels of item non-response and response values for a limited number of questions. Most notably, response by Web (relative to telephone) was found to have increased the likelihood of non-response to questions relating to pay and other financial matters, and increased the likelihood of 'less desirable' responses. For example, response by Web resulted in the reporting of more units of alcohol consumed, and more negative responses to subjectiveThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Effects of Question Characteristics on Item Nonresponse in Telephone and Web Survey Modes

“…While self-administered modes generally provide more missing data (Bowling 2005, de Leeuw 1992, Guzy and Leitgöb 2015, this is particularly true if questions are difficult or do not relate to their circumstances (Greene, Speizer, and Wiitala 2008). Also, web surveys produce higher item non-responses for variables where a numeric value has to be entered, such as the value of one's property, the amount left to pay off on a mortgage, or weekly pay (Goodman et al 2020;Voorpostel et al 2020). Although these are rather sensitive questions and one might expect that the anonymity of the Web would produce less item non-responses, there seems to be no relation between sensitivity and item nonresponse (Tourangeau et al 2000;Tourangeau and Yan 2007).…”

Pre-pandemic trajectories of depressive symptomatology and their relation to depression during the COVID-19 pandemic: longitudinal study of English older people

“…mental health status) in self-administered surveys than in face-to-face interviews. 36 – 38 However, given the unprecedently high response rate, we speculate that this bias would have been minimal. Third, in this study, although we controlled for baseline age, we did not investigate whether trajectories of depressive symptomatology (and their relationships with depression during the COVID-19 pandemic) differed across different age groups.…”

Association between psychological distress trajectories from adolescence to midlife and mental health during the pandemic: evidence from two British birth cohorts

“…However, as we have no counterfactual at the time of the pandemic, we cannot assume the relative risks of poorer mental health outcomes were directly the result of the pandemic itself, ensuing circumstances and/or other factors. As with most research conducted during the pandemic, interviews were conducted online, and may have resulted in measurement bias and potential mode effects (Goodman et al, 2022 ), we cannot preclude that differences in results may be due to ‘true’ differences, measurement error or a mode effect (or a combination of those). However, evidence shows measurement invariance between all pre-pandemic and COVID-19 measurements of psychological distress in both cohorts suggesting mode effects did not bias our findings (Moreno-Agostino et al, 2022 ).…”

“…We use latent class analysis to predict class membership, based on individual's posterior probability of belonging to each class, after random starting draws. Identification of latent classes was based on theory and research including prior work on trajectories of mental health (Colman et al, 2007;Musliner et al, 2016;Paksarian et al, 2016), including work using national cohorts (Gondek et al, 2022) and timing of onset in the general population (Kessler et al, 2007), as well as identifying the best-fitting model based on information criteria, accuracy, substantive meaning and parsimony (Bauer & Curran, 2003). (Further details are available in online Supplementary Tables S5.1 and S5.2…”