Cameron McPhee and Eran Ben-Porath recently presented a short course at the PAPOR 2025 Annual Meeting titled: “Finding People Where They Are: Multi-Sample/Multi-Mode Approaches to Survey Research.”   The course focused on evolving methods addressing the challenges of reaching representative samples of respondents at a time in which people vary in their willingness to respond to different forms of communication.

While this has been a challenge since the onset of public opinion research, the current moment has made it more complicated. With these challenges in mind, the course provided real-world examples of how incorporating multiple sample-frames, contacting respondents through different types of outreaching, and offering a diverse set of platforms to respond, improves the representativeness of samples.

The Advent of Multi-Frame, Multi-Access, and Multi-Mode

  • Multi-Frame: Potential respondents can be reached through more than one sample-frame
  • Multi-Access (outreach): Sampled individuals can be invited to participate in more than one way: by mail, by phone, by email, by text message
  • Multi-Mode (response): Respondents can participate in the survey in more than one way: online, by phone, by mail, possibly by SMS

This adds methodological complexity, but allows us to get closer to a representative responding sample.

Finding People Where They Are: Multi-Frame Survey

  • One frame may not be enough to reach people
  • More than just coverage: even if someone can be accessed through one frame (e.g., landline), it does not mean they will respond
  • Complicating probability of selection:  Some respondents, but not all, can be included in more than one frame

Finding People Where They Are: Multi-Access Survey

  • Account for people’s preferred types of communication to participate in the survey
PAPOR blog

Finding People Where They Are:  Multi-Mode Survey

Account for people’s comfort levels in answering the questionnaire

  • Varying level of comfort with mode of communication
  • Non-randomness in trends of answering the phone
  • Non-randomness in getting and using the mail (the one in paper)
  • Varying levels of literacy
  • Varying levels of web proficiency