Adaptive Designs and Incentives

I've been working on a paper about an incentive experiment that we did. It raised some interesting issues. And made me recall one of my favorite papers. Trussell and Lavrakas looked at incentives to a follow-up survey. They found that if someone had refused or been difficult to contact in the initial, screening survey, then a higher incentive was needed than for someone who had not refused or been difficult to contact. The incentives they recommend also differed by some demographic characteristics as well.

I liked this example since the adaptation was linked, in part, to the paradata. These are the kinds of adaptations I have the most interest in. They require learning on the part of the survey organization that happens during data collection. I have the feeling that these kinds of adaptations can be particularly powerful since in models predicting response, it is often the case that paradata overwhelm the predictive power of demographic characteristics.

There are all sorts of ethical and procedural issues with offering differential incentives that make it difficult to carry out in practice, but I still think this is a neat example.

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Tailoring vs. Targeting

One of the chapters in a recent book on surveying hard-to-reach populations looks at "targeting and tailoring" survey designs. The chapter references this paper on the use of the terms among those who design health communication. I thought the article was an interesting one. They start by saying that "one way to classify message strategies like tailoring is by the level of specificity with which characteristics of the target audience are reflected in the the communication." That made sense. There is likely a continuum of specificity ranging from complete non-differentiation across units to nearly individualized. But then the authors break that continuum and try to define a "fundamental" difference between tailoring and targeting. They say targeting is for some subgroup while tailoring is to the characteristics of the individual. That sounds good, but at least for surveys, I'm not sure the distinction holds. In survey design, what would constitute

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