Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
ESRA (European Survey Research Association) 2023 Conference, Milan, İtalya, 17 - 21 Temmuz 2023
Turkey is not an exception in declining the response rates over time as in most countries across the world. This decline is more visible for clusters with high socio-economic status in urban settlements. The reduced response in high socio-economic groups and resistance of remarkable response in low socio-economic groups may affect the reliability of estimates. For instance, the infant mortality rate which is on the decline since 1993, estimated at 13 per thousand in 2013, increased to 17 per thousand in 2018 Turkey Demographic and Health Survey (TDHS) while it declined to less than 10 per thousand according to the registration system. This result seems to be associated with an increasing part of interviewed households with low welfare. The primary objective of this study is to examine the effect of household welfare on response behavior. The data comes from the six nationwide repeated cross-sectional surveys conducted in the period 1993-2018. The descriptive findings showed that almost half of the interviews were completed in the clusters that achieved the median number of interviews in 1993, while it declined to 37 percent in 2018. Multivariate analyses that control for just household welfare found that low welfare level increases the odds of interviewing households up to 10.3 times in 2018. The final model that controls for the region, type of settlement, number of visits, number of eligible women, household size, number of children under five, and mean years of education estimated a remarkable effect, particularly for the last three surveys. These findings suggest several requirements such as taking steps to ease gaining cooperation with housing units that have high security, organising special training sessions focusing on nonresponse, sending prenotification letters to selected units, media activities designed to create awareness among households, and collecting para-data for nonrespondents.