Does a Familiar Face Increase Response? Using Consistent Interviewer Assignments over Multiple Survey Contacts

Often in agricultural surveys implemented by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), the same operations are selected multiple times during the year and over a period of several years. It is assumed by most employees of NASS that these multiple contacts are considered burdensome to respondents who are contacted over and over again. It is hypothesized that if personal relationships between interviewers and these operators were established, multiple contacts would not seem as burdensome, creating more positive responses from these operators. In order to see if developing a more personal relationship with operators would increase response rates on agricultural surveys, a sample of operations was chosen in one state across all surveys. Each operation in this sample was assigned an interviewer who made all survey contacts for the operation. This operation-interviewer pairing continued for a period of two years. Response rates for these operations were compared to operations who were not assigned the same interviewers for each contact. Also, operation response rates from the two years with the permanently assigned interviewers were compared to those from the two years prior to the assignment of the permanent interviewers.