ABSTRACT: Researchers who conduct population surveys face escalating costs and declining response rates, as they aim to collect data that is representative, trustworthy, and publishable. Sample recruitment is often prohibitively expensive to researchers, and cheap convenience samples are fraught with representation and quality issues. NORC at the University of Chicago has built a survey panel called
AmeriSpeak to help researchers navigate these choppy waters. AmeriSpeak is a probability (random) sample of US households recruited to take surveys for NORC. Dan Costanzo, a Director of Business Development at NORC, will talk about AmeriSpeak’s novel approach to sample recruitment, which includes sending field interviewers located throughout the US to the homes of non-responders. The
result of NORC’s rigorous efforts is a panel that delivers higher response rates and a more representative sample of US adults than mail and phone recruitment efforts alone provide. AmeriSpeak is commercially available to academic, government, media, and other researchers. Costanzo will also talk about the Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS), a federally funded program through
Northwestern University that enables academic researchers to use AmeriSpeak for free.