How to Maintain a Panel of Political Migrants: Evidence from a Field Experiment

• In Event: Advances in Survey Design

Abstract

Maintaining voluntary panels, particularly for populations in precarious or vulnerable positions, is challenging. This is evident in all stages of panel maintenance, including recruitment, retention for follow-up surveys, and ensuring high completion rates. Our experience with a three-wave online panel survey of over 5000 Russian political migrants who fled post the 2022 Ukraine invasion, highlighted specific retention issues. Groups like men, older individuals, those with higher incomes, lower general trust, and less political activity, showed lower likelihoods of leaving contact information for follow-ups, thus reducing their panel participation.

In this pre-registered field experiment, we implemented interventions to encourage panel participation in three crucial areas: recruitment, questionnaire completion, and follow-up engagement. The experimental group was incentivized by the promise of gaining access to real-time, aggregated responses from other participants on certain questions. The experiment aimed to assess the impact of these interventions on recruitment, completion rates, and follow-up participation. We employ a heterogeneous analysis to examine the impact of our treatment on groups that are difficult to retain.

Authors

• Ivetta Sergeeva, Stanford University

• Emil Kamalov, European University Institute