Kipling Walker
Kipling is a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Family Studies. He supports the Survey Methodology team in designing survey content and delivery for Ten to Men: The Australian Longitudinal Study on Male Health.
Kipling has experience in designing content and materials for national surveys, including conducting cognitive interviews with participants across Australia. His areas of interest include survey mode effects, digital usability and accessibility, and designing inclusive questions to properly reflect diverse populations.
Session
Longitudinal researchers face multiple design challenges, often with limited resources. This presentation details a unique approach to addressing some of these challenges in Ten to Men: The Australian Longitudinal Study on Male Health. By strategically reusing and modifying our fieldwork materials, methodology and incentive approaches, we used a single fieldwork period to collect data from our main sample, re-engage lost participants, pilot a new survey format, and test retention rates for recently recruited top-up pilot participants.
Ten to Men, which is funded by the Department of Health and Aged Care, began in 2013. The fieldwork activities outlined in this session occurred as part of Wave 4 of the study (August - November 2022). Novel activities included: a shortened survey version as a ‘mop up’ method for non-responding participants; using this shortened survey to re-engage participants who had not responded to previous waves; combining the survey with a novel dietary tool to pilot a modularised content approach; and testing retention rates for a pilot top-up sample recruited in early 2022.
This approach also presented challenges. With differing fieldwork start and end dates, survey lengths and incentive strategies for each group, we needed to carefully design public-facing materials including participant letters, brochures, and participant information on our website. We also carefully designed and validated each survey type to ensure it was appropriate to its target group.
In this presentation, we provide background on the Ten to Men study, and discuss in detail how we arrived at this simultaneous Wave 4 fieldwork approach. We explore the opportunities and challenges of taking four sub-studies to field and share our learnings from this experience.
Recording link: https://acspri-org-au.zoom.us/rec/share/sFdBbpep0OoacPzm634BiKe4bVY9lbHVDFWPYTVAhPA0z5bW5jP-TMNaiTTN1hdG.b2WvY5pK2mJq3Prh?startTime=1669171227000