Author:

Abstract:

The worsening of the survey climate is regularly reported by several researchers of several countries because of the decreasing response rates and the need for increased efforts to reach an acceptable response rate for a survey. At the same time, differences between countries and surveys about the actual level and the evolution of response rates are also reported. These differences are linked to differences in the content of the survey or in the survey design. This means it is hard to study the evolution of the survey climate over time based on different studies. An optimal opportunity for describing the changing survey climate is found in the survey of Social-Cultural changes in Flanders, which was organized for the first time in 1996 and repeated each year. Contact data from 1996 to 2013 are analyzed to describe the evolution of some non-response quality indicators. Furthermore, changes in population definition, sampling procedure and contact procedure are listed to examine their effect. To analyze the contrast between respondents and non-respondents, the weighing coefficients are compared through the years. The results show that the refusal rates increase and the cooperation rates decrease. The response rates are stable because of increased contact rates. This suggests that an improvement of the contact procedure does not result by itself in a higher response rate due to more refusals. Although there is an increase in the effort to contact the respondents, the costs of the fieldwork organization are declining over years. The changes in population definition and sampling procedure could not be linked to the described evolution of the non-response quality indicators. Also the contrast between respondents and non-respondents seems to be rather stable over time.