THE POTENTIAL OF MAIL SURVEYS IN GEOGRAPHY: SOME EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE* |
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| Authors: | Eran Feitelson |
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| Institution: | ERAN FEITELSON (Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University) is Lecturer, Department of Geography, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. His research interests include growth controls, transportation and environmental policy issues, behavioral geography, and market research. |
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| Abstract: | Faced with soaring survey costs, geographers may increasingly consider mail or telephone surveys as alternatives to in-person interviews. This study goes beyond comparisons of response rates to analyze possible biases of administration methods in geographic studies. An empirical comparison between an in-person interview survey and two mail surveys of recent home buyers’ housing preferences revealed that the mail surveys provided better representation of this population, as they had a higher completion rate (though lower response rate). While respondent attributes differed across administration modes, no direct effects of administration method on responses were found. Mail surveys appear to be a viable alternative to personal interviews in a wider set of cases than geographers usually assume, though more empirical work is needed to determine the extent of such cases. |
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| Keywords: | surveys nonresponse sampling residential preferences |
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