Making an Impersonal Method Personal - Experiences from a Telephone Initiated Mail Survey among Transport Buyers

A major concern when carrying out a survey is the problem of avoiding bias and getting a high response rate. The aim of this paper is to reveal the outcomes of using a telephone initiated survey method and how this will affect the validity, reliability and especially the response rate. The analysis is based on our personal experiences of using this method when carried out an extensive mail survey among persons responsible for the purchasing of goods transports in manufacturing and wholesale companies in Sweden. The mail survey covered the transport pattern of the core service i.e. the actual transport today, but also attitudes towards logistic services (such as delivery time, price etc), choice of forwarder, and environmental issues regarding transports. The survey targeted companies having outbound goods transports exceeding 150 km. The results presented show the benefits and short-comings of the method. They also show how a telephone initiated survey method affects the response rate in a positive way and increases the understanding of the survey results. By establishing a personal contact with the respondents, an informal link was established which generated a greater commitment to answering the survey.