Recruiting Respondents for a Mobile Phone Panel: The Impact of Recruitment Question Wording on Cooperation, Panel Attrition, and Nonresponse Bias

This paper is concerned with the optimal wording of the recruitment question for a mobile phone panel survey in Germany. In order to learn more about the effects of different recruitment questions on the size and composition of the panel, we experimented with four different recruitment question versions. We analyzed the effectiveness of each question version with regard to three indicators: (1) What is the proportion of respondents who agree to take part in the panel? (2) Will the respondents who agreed to become panel members actually participate in the panel? (3) To what extent are differential nonresponse biases induced into the panel, since each question version may have differential effects on the composition of the recruited sample? Findings are discussed in light of an adaptive field work design: We propose a tailored request for participation for each individual respondent based on sociodemographic and other relevant variables.