Survey response and survey characteristics: micro level evidence from the European Community household panel

This paper presents micro-level evidence on the role of the socio-demographic characteristics of the population and the characteristics of the data collection process as predictors of survey response. Our evidence is based on the public use files of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), a longitudinal household survey covering the countries of the European Union, whose attractive feature is the high level of comparability across countries and over time. We model the response process as the outcome of two sequential events: (i) contact between the interviewer and an eligible interviewee, and (ii) cooperation of the interviewee. Our model allows for dependence between the ease of contact and the propensity to cooperate, taking into account the censoring problem caused by the fact that we observe whether a person is a respondent only if she has been contacted.