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Persuasion Letters

This is a highly tailored strategy. The idea is that certain kinds of interviewer observations about contact with sampled households will be used to tailor a letter that is sent to the household. For example, if someone in the household says they are "too busy" to complete the survey, a letter is sent that specifically addresses that concern.

It's pretty clear that this is adaptive. But here again, thinking about it as an adaptive feature could improve a) our understanding of the technique, and b) -- at least potentially -- its performance.

In practice, interviewers request that these letters be sent. There is variability in the rules they use about when to make that request. This could be good or bad. It might be good if they use all of the "data" that they have from their contacts with the household. That's more data than the central office has. On the other hand, it could be bad if interviewers vary in their ability to "correctly" identify cases that could benefit from a letter. We could run some experiments to see which of these conditions prevail.


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  1. www.peterlugtig.comOctober 8, 2013 at 2:59 PM

    I see a really nice experiment here ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. James WagnerOctober 9, 2013 at 9:21 PM

    I've been trying to sell this experiment to several studies. No takers. :-(

    ReplyDelete

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