RAND Roybal Center for Financial Decision Making
American Life Panel
The ALP is an Internet panel of respondents 18 and over. Respondents in the panel either use their own computer to log on to the Internet or a Web TV (http://www.webtv.com/pc/), which allows them to access the Internet, using their television and a telephone line. The technology allows respondents who did not have previous Internet access to participate in the panel and furthermore use the Web TVs for browsing the Internet or use email.
About once a month, respondents receive an email with a request to visit the ALP URL and fill out questionnaires on the Internet. Typically an interview will not take more than 30 minutes. Respondents are paid an incentive of about $20 per thirty minutes of interviewing (and proportionately less if an interview is shorter). The ALP is modeled after the CentERpanel in The Netherlands, which has been in existence since 1990 (http://www.uvt.nl/centerdata/en/). Both Bas Weerman and Arie Kapteyn were affiliated with the CentERpanel before coming to RAND.
The respondents in the ALP are recruited from among individuals age 18 and older who are respondents to the Monthly Survey (MS) of the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center (SRC). The MS is the leading consumer sentiments survey that incorporates the long-standing Survey of Consumer Attitudes (SCA) and produces, among others, the widely used Index of Consumer Expectations. Each month, the MS interviews approximately 500 households, of which 300 households are a random-digit-dial (RDD) sample and 200 are re-interviewed from the RDD sample surveyed six months previously.
SRC screens MS respondents. It asks MS-respondents age 18 or older if they have Internet access and, if yes, whether they would be willing to participate in Internet surveys (with approximate response categories “no, certainly not,” “probably not,” “maybe,” “probably,” “yes, definitely”). If the response category is not “no, certainly not,” respondents are told that the University of Michigan is undertaking a joint project with RAND. They are asked if they would object to SRC sharing their information about them with RAND so that they could be contacted later and asked if they would be willing to actually participate in an Internet survey. Many MS-respondents are interviewed twice. At the end of the second interview, an attempt is made to convert respondents who refused in the first round. This attempt includes the mention of the fact that participation in follow-up research carries a reward of $20 for each half-hour interview.
Top