Increasingly, survey and market researchers are reverting back to address-based methodologies to reach the general public for survey administration and related commercial applications. Essentially, there are three main factors for this change: evolving coverage problems associated with telephone-based methods; eroding rates of response to telephone contacts along with the increasing costs of remedial measures to counter nonresponse; and on the other hand, recent improvements in the databases of household addresses available to researchers. This note provides an assessment of these three factors along with specific enhancements that Marketing Systems Group (MSG) can offer when developing an address-based protocol for survey and market research applications.

In particular, enhancements provided by MSG include amelioration of some of the known coverage problems associated with the addressed-based sampling frames and their augmentation with demographic, geographic, and other supplementary data items. While reducing bias due to undercoverage – particularly in rural areas where more households rely on P.O. Boxes and inconsistent address formats – such enhancements enable researcher to develop more efficient sample designs as well as broaden their analytical possibilities through an expanded set of covariates for hypothesis testing and statistical modeling tasks.

For more information, please click on the Related Document to the right - Address-Based Sampling.