Contact Rate

Contact rate measures the proportion of eligible cases in the sampling pool in which a member of a sampled household was contacted—that is, reached by an interviewer (in telephone and in-person surveys) or received the survey request (in the case of mail and Internet surveys). Contact rates can be computed for all surveys, regardless of the mode in which the data are gathered. The contact rate is a survey outcome rate that can be cited in survey reports and in research literature. Although no single rate or number can reflect the total quality of a survey, contact rates (along with survey response rates, survey cooperation rates, and survey refusal rates) are one of the most common outcome tools that researchers use to evaluate survey quality.

Both ...