STRATEGIES TO INCREASE THE RESPONSE RATE AND RESULTS OF THE EUROPEAN SOCIAL SURVEY IN SPAIN;Estrategias para aumentar la tasa de respuesta y los resultados de la encuesta social Europea en España

The longitudinal analysis of the contact form data of the third round of the European Social Survey in Spain allows us to identify the most successful strategies in order to increase response rates in social and political surveys in Spain. The analysis of these data provides us with very useful information to estimate what are the likely gains in response rate due to the improvements of fieldwork design and supervision. More especially, we show in this paper that concentrating fieldwork efforts in locating and converting refusals with specific strategies such as a better controlling of interviewers, increasing incentives, and targeting respondents after the regular working hours and during weekends really pay off.