This afternoon, I attended a session on how the number of survey contacts affects data quality and results equivalence this afternoon. I just loved the tables and stats and multicollinearity. Many of my hunches, and likely your hunches were confirmed and yes overly obvious.
But something bothered me. As cool as it is to confirm that people who are reluctant to participate give bad data and people who always participate give good data, it irked me to be reminded that our standard business practice is to recontact people ten times. 10. TEN. X.
Have we conveniently ignored various facts?
– people have call display. When they see the same name and number pop up ten times, they learn to hate that caller. And the name associated with that caller. And that makes our industry look terrible.
– half of people are introverts. A ton of them let every call go to voicemail which means we are pissing them off by calling them ten times in a few days. Seriously pissing them off. I know. I’m a certified, high order introvert.
– I like to listen to what people say about research companies online. People DO search out the numbers on their call display and identify survey companies. Even if you use local numbers to encourage participation. And yet again, this makes us look bad.
Why do we allow this? For the sake of data integrity? Hogwash. It’s easy for me.
Do we care about respondents or not?
The LoveStats Blog 
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