Are Refusal Conversions "Adaptive?"

I have two feelings about talking about adaptive or responsive designs. The first feeling is that these are new concepts, so we need to invent new methods to implement them. The second feeling is that although these are new concepts, we can point to actual things that we have always (or for a long time) done and say, "that's an example of this new concept" that existed before the concept had been formalized.

I think refusal conversions are a good example. We never really applied the same protocol to all cases. Some cases got a tailored or adaptive design feature. The rule is something like this: if the case refuses to complete the interview, then change the interviewer, make another attempt, and offer a higher incentive.

I'm trying to think systematically about these kinds of examples. Some are trivial ("if there is no answer on the first call attempt, then make a second attempt"). But others may not be. The more of these we can root out, the more we can formalize the actual policies we currently use. Such a formalization would be good -- more consistent practice, reduced study to study variability, easier to optimize.

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Assessment of Maching Learning Classifiers

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What is Data Quality, and How to Enhance it in Research

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