Modeling Self-enumeration and Follow-up Response Indicators as Discrete-time Survival - ARCHIVED

Collecting information from sampled units over the Internet or by mail is much more cost-efficient than conducting interviews. These methods make self-enumeration an attractive data-collection method for surveys and censuses. Despite the benefits associated with self-enumeration data collection, in particular Internet-based data collection, self-enumeration can produce low response rates compared with interviews. To increase response rates, nonrespondents are subject to a mixed mode of follow-up treatments, which influence the resulting probability of response, to encourage them to participate. Factors and interactions are commonly used in regression analyses, and have important implications for the interpretation of statistical models. Because response occurrence is intrinsically conditional, we first record response occurrence in discrete intervals, and we characterize the probability of response by a discrete time hazard. This approach facilitates examining when a response is most likely to occur and how the probability of responding varies over time. The nonresponse bias can be avoided by multiplying the sampling weight of respondents by the inverse of an estimate of the response probability. Estimators for model parameters as well as for finite population parameters are given. Simulation results on the performance of the proposed estimators are also presented.