Mailing campaigns are a way to keep longitudinal survey respondents engaged. While mailings usually include a survey answer request, sometimes respondents are contacted between-waves to update contact information or simply to keep respondent contact. Research on the actual impact of these between-wave contacts on response rates is scarce. This…

In web surveys, no interviewer is present to clarify question comprehension problems, which can be particularly prevalent among respondents with low literacy skills. Although plain language is used in various contexts to improve text comprehensibility, its use in social science questionnaires has not been investigated to date. Using a…

Probes are follow-ups to survey questions used to gain insights on respondents' understanding of and responses to these questions. They are usually administered as open-ended questions, primarily in the context of questionnaire pretesting. Due to the decreased cost of data collection for open-ended questions in web surveys, researchers have argued…

Parents' judgment of their children's cognitive ability is important for providing adequate learning environments. This study examined parents' judgment accuracy with 2346 children (M = 8.94 years; 48.3% girls) and their parents (1283 mothers, 426 fathers, and 637 parental pairs). The data were collected between September 2012 and February 2014 in…