Increasing Response Rates from Teachers Posted on February 15, 2006 Robert C. Pianta (bio) shares a some tips about efficient data collection.

Once you're in a school setting collecting data, probably the thing that we do most when we're working in schools as researchers is we send questionnaires to teachers that we want them to fill out, and we want access to children in classrooms to perform some assessment. That's the usual routine kind of situation, or you might be wanting to go in to do some observations.

The biggest challenge has to do with the school runs on its own pace. If it's a snow day, you may have all the scheduling put in place to have your research assistants in there to go in and do some assessments of kids. It's a snow day, and all of those plans are gone. You have to reshuffle the deck as it were and reprogram for getting that information again.

One of the things you very quickly realize is that you don't have control over an awful lot of things that you'd really like to have to control, and this again makes the issue of planning and really troubleshooting to be all the worst case scenarios is unfortunately what you have to spend a fair amount of time doing. Talking to somebody who has done school-based research is often a really good thing to try to do just to get some hints about those.

We found a couple of different tricks over the years. For example, in the typical study when you're trying to get questionnaires from teachers, mailing the questionnaires out and having the teacher return them, you're usually going to get about 50%. Then you're going to badger them, which they don't like to be badgered. A couple different ways of trying to handle that would be to piggyback on a faculty meeting where you go in and you hand out the questionnaires at the end of the faculty meeting. You have the teachers fill them out, and you have them all there. Clearly, paying teachers is an important thing to do. They expect to be compensated for their time, and we pay them fairly generously for their time. Not always does that result in 100% data collection, but I think it does reflect a certain respect for their time.

We've also, just in the last two years, transformed all of our questionnaire and paper-pencil measures into web-based forms, and those can be filled out much more rapidly. They save the researcher a whole lot of time in terms of follow-up with teachers about various things because you can build in routines for skip patterns or for missing data that in the end, anything that saves you as a researcher having to make one more contact to a teacher to follow up saves you time and builds goodwill on the part of the teacher. The responses from the teachers we work with about the web interface indicate they find that to be a much more positive way to interact with us in terms of efficiency and use of their time. They like it a lot.

When we use the web interface as a data collection tool for the kind of questionnaires we usually ask teachers to complete, we're finding that we're up above almost 80% of complete data collection during the window that we would like to have the questionnaires completed as in contrast to about 50% if we mailed out the questionnaires. Now that takes some lead time again, having to send some emails to teachers to remind them, giving them instructions, making sure they have a computer they can use, but it really has cut down a lot on time and increased our response rate.

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