On Tuesday August 25, 2020 we celebrate the 30th birthday of the International Workshop on Nonresponse and the 35th birthday of JOS. We are pleased to invite your participation in this celebratory 30th Workshop, which will take place in Örebro, Sweden. Hosts are the Department of Statistics, Örebro University and Statistics Sweden.
To be able to celebrate both happy occasions, we extended the workshop with half a day: we start after lunch on Tuesday August 25, 2020 and end Friday morning the 28th just before lunch.
The focus of the Workshop is nonresponse in household surveys. The main goal of the Workshop is to bring “adjusters” and “reducers” together and to initiate cooperation on different projects. The Workshop facilitates the exchange of new ideas and collaboration between researchers actively involved in nonresponse research. In this spirit, the Workshop encourages participants to present work that is still in progress as well as novel approaches to nonresponse issues.
We are honored to welcome in this anniversary year Prof. Don Dillman as our keynote speaker. His presentation is titled ‘How Out-of-Date Theories are Constraining our Efforts to Reduce Survey Non-Response’. Don reviews the use of various theories applied by surveyors in hopes of reducing survey nonresponse. He states that most theories are significantly out-of-date and foster piecemeal approaches to survey design that do not take into account the rapidly changing nature of today’s survey environment. The goal of his talk is to suggest specific steps needed for developing better theories of respondent behavior that, when applied to the creation of survey designs, will improve our ability to reduce survey nonresponse.
In conjunction with this keynote event, we plan to have a panel discussion on theories of survey participation, and how survey methodologists use these theories to shape survey design. That is, if people still dare, with Don’s presentation looming over them!
In addition, we would welcome contributions on topics like:
- Survey fieldwork: what do you do to cope with lower response rates and changing devices?
- We specifically reach out to people working on Adaptive or Responsive Survey Design as a means to combat nonresponse,
- Hybrid forms of data collection, i.e. mixes of survey and big (sensor) data with the aim of reducing burden and nonresponse,
- Asking respondents’ consent to using (their) big and administrative data and/or sensor data,
- And we explicitly repeat our invitation to ‘adjusters’.
But ongoing work on any of the topics in the last years is welcome: efforts to improve response rates, interviewer behavior, push-to-web designs, smartphones and sensor data, data protection and research ethics, split questionnaire design, panel attrition, and many others.