The National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES) includes a series of random digit dial (RDD) surveys developed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. It is designed to collect information on important educational issues through telephone surveys of households in the United States. This report describes an experiment conducted in NHES:2003. The goal of the experiment was to test the effectiveness of various levels of incentives in gaining increased initial cooperation, refusal conversion, and overall unit response rates. Approximately 79,000 telephone numbers were included in the experiment. The results of the experiment indicate that small cash incentives, used during initial contact stages of the interview process (the Screener stage), can be effective in improving unit response, at least for NHES collections.
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