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Health care insurance companies often conduct sample surveys of health plan members. Survey purposes include: consumer satisfaction with the plan and members’ health status, functional status, health literacy and/or health services utilization outside of the plan. Vendors or contractors typically conduct these surveys for insurers. Survey results may be used for plans’ accreditation, evaluation, quality improvement and/or marketing. This article describes typical sampling plans and data analysis strategies used in these surveys, showing how these methods may result in biased estimators of population parameters (e.g. percentage of plan members who are satisfied). Practical suggestions are given to improve these surveys: alternate sampling plans, increasing the response rate, component calculation for the survey response rate, weighted analyses, and adjustments for unit non-response. Since policy, regulation, accreditation, management and marketing decisions are based, in part, on results from these member surveys, these important and numerous surveys need to be of higher quality.

The Internet is promised a brilliant future among the favorite tools of marketing researchers. Develops a typology of Internet marketing surveys showing the existence of eight different designs that can be used by marketers. However, researchers who plan to develop research using the Internet need to be aware of several problems related to this new tool. In particular we show that the nature of the Internet creates different sampling problems. To identify these problems, a seven‐step procedure following the steps of the sampling process is proposed. Several practical problems are then discussed.

This paper aims to compare residential fixed-line telephone surveys with cell phone surveys for assessing the extent of the potential undercoverage issue evaluating the necessity and feasibility of conducting cell phone surveys or dual-frame telephone surveys in Hong Kong.

The research team simultaneously carried out a conventional fixed-line telephone survey and a cell phone survey in 2015 with similar features on survey design, sampling and data collection procedures. Two samples with sample size of 801 and 1,203 were achieved separately. Data collected were analysed to see to what extent survey findings will be biased if the sampling frame of telephone surveys is solely based on residential fixed-line numbers in Hong Kong, and if such a bias does exist, whether a survey conducted through cell phones or by adding a cell phone-only (CO) group would be an ideal solution for it.

The findings show that the cooperation rates for the cell phone survey were much lower than those of the fixed-line telephone survey. The respondents from two surveys were fairly different. However, estimates of most commonly used socio-demographic characteristics from the latter group had the least bias compared with population statistics. Supplanting the traditional fixed-line survey with a cell phone survey or supplementing it with a CO group will not make the resulting sample a better representative of the population but it will amplify the sample bias on the major social socio-demographic characteristics.

This paper empirically compares the two types of telephone surveys in a well-designed scientific study.

This paper shows several results obtained from the first investigation made in Spain using Dillman's total design method for mail surveys. In the spring of 1998 a survey was carried out on consumer behaviour in one particular Spanish region (Navarra). The response rate was 68.3 percent. One month later, a team of professional interviewers interviewed the people who did not respond to the mail survey. The objective is to compare the results obtained by these interviewers with an estimation of the non‐response after using several different methods and a group of adjustment procedures.

The total design method (TDM) for mail surveys has produced some wonderful results in several countries in Northern and Central Europe, but as far as one can gather it has never been used in any of the countries of Southern Europe surrounding the Mediterranean. The excellent results obtained from mail surveys in the USA, and some of the findings confirmed by disciples of Dillman in several European countries, led to carrying out the first investigation in Spain using TDM through mail surveys. With the aim of resolving some of the above‐mentioned questions, it was decided to make the first‐ever investigation using TDM within Spanish society.

The results obtained by applying the total design method to a Mediterranean country do not differ greatly from data obtained by other researchers on the efficiency of mailing surveys in other countries. This fact forces one to have serious doubts about the declarations of some experts who place the response rate for mailing surveys at 40 percent in Spain. In this paper, different strategies to reduce the impact of non‐response in a mail survey are outlined. First, a second interview was carried out with a subsample of the interviewees who were non‐responders, with the aim of finding out more about the characteristics of those who do not respond. Later, a strategy of weighting was used using CHAID to identify the best predictors from among the set of variables available.

In the South of Europe there is very sparse use of mail surveys, while there is great use of face‐to‐face surveys: this is the opposite of the tendency in other countries, where telephone surveys are supplanting the face‐to‐face interview. This is the first research about non‐response in mail surveys in the South of Europe.

Surveying hard-to-reach groups is difficult but necessary to prevent selection effects and biased sampling. Their diversity makes it difficult to recommend efficient solutions because they bring challenges that are specific to each group. Among these are limited ability in official languages, literacy problems, physical or mental disabilities or the particularities of subgroups such as ethnic, religious and cultural minorities, adolescents and the elderly. Drawing notably on lessons from migration research, this paper reviews the contemporary issues associated with five sets of circumstances that may result in groups being unreached by transport surveys.