Recommendations
The pilot was successful in attracting participants and exceeded response rate expectations.
Estimates of gambling participation and problem gambling were somewhat higher than those based on the Health Survey for England (HSE) but were lower than those typically generated by online panel surveys and thus broadly commensurate with expectations at this stage. We have also identified two potential explanations for this, outlined in the Assessment of pilot survey results section, which lend themselves to further development work.
Based on these findings, we recommend that the push-to-web methodology is suitable for roll out to the experimental statistics stage, subject to the recommendations detailed in chapter 7 of the pilot methodology report.
The key recommendations are as follows:
- retain the postal follow-up to the online survey
- retain the mailing strategy
- undertake further work to further understand non-response bias towards non-gamblers and make changes to reduce it
- increase the age of eligibility from 16 to 18 years
- consider increasing the sample size, to allow for more split-sample experiments and sub-sample analysis to be conducted during the experimental phase
- further refine and test questionnaire content whilst considering how the average completion time can be reduced.
Assessment of pilot survey results
Last updated: 23 May 2022
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