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Presenting Results: Adaptive Design for Telephone Surveys

I'll be presenting results from the adaptive call scheduling experiment on Monday, November 2nd at the FCSM Research Conference. The results were promising, at least for the calls governed by the experimental protocol. The following table summarizes the results:


The next step is to extend the experimental protocol to the calls that were not involved with the experiment (mainly refusal conversion calls), and to attempt this with a face-to-face survey.
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  1. Andy PeytchevOctober 29, 2009 at 2:14 PM

    Did the experimental scheduling lead to more call attempts (as I doubt you can force the call scheduler to keep the cases from the two conditions to be delivered proportionally)? It would be interesting to see the number of interviews too and the actual prediction & implementation, but I won't be at FCSM... Very interesting, James.

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  2. JamesOctober 31, 2009 at 2:16 PM

    We had the scheduler deliver cases from the control and experimental group in an interwoven fashion. It would take 5 cases from each group and put them at the top of the sort, repeating this procedure until the entire sample was sorted.

    Of course, the protocol only applies to cases that don't have an appointment, weren't a return call on a busy signal, etc.

    We did run into a situation where we finished the experimental group, but the control group required more effort. So things got "out of whack" at the end of the field period.

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