Campus Climate Surveys of Sexual Misconduct: Limiting the Risk of Nonresponse Bias

We also compare the costs of adding the second phase design to the costs of increasing the individual incentives. [...] Due to the expected high costs of telephone and face-to-face contacts employed, Phase 2 of the survey chose a random sample of the nonrespondents who remained at the close of Phase 1. [...] The high overall response rate is a product of combining each of the steps described above, but two of those elements are particularly expensive – the individual incentives and the work of trained interviewers. [...] In our last set of analyses we assess the impact of both the incentive level and the two-phase survey design on the key summary measures of each of these types of sexual misconduct. [...] Nevertheless, comparison of a random assignment experiment on incentive level and the two-phase design, which used interviewer-assisted recruitment of a random subsample of nonresponding students, reveals that the expense of the second phase generated a bigger improvement in the response rate than the higher incentive, and the costs of interviewer effort can be affordable.