Blog Written by Kevin Collins, Chief Research Officer, Survey 160
CIPHER Presentation by Kevin Collins and Cameron McPhee, SSRS Chief Methodologist
One of the persistent challenges in probability-based survey research is that some groups of respondents are consistently more difficult to reach.
Mail-based outreach to address-based samples (ABS), a standard approach to building probability panels, typically underrepresents several important groups, including younger adults, Hispanic respondents, Black respondents, those without a college degree, lower-income households, and people who did not vote in the most recent election, to name a few. These gaps are well-documented, and while post-survey weighting can help correct for them, weighting alone cannot solve problems that stem from who is and is not in the panel to begin with. The best solution is to recruit a more representative panel in the first place.
In this post, we describe a collaboration between Survey 160 and SSRS to test whether supplementing traditional mail-based recruitment with SMS outreach to prepaid cell phone numbers can bring harder-to-reach populations into a probability panel. The results, which we presented at the 2026 CIPHER conference, suggest that it can, and that the panelists recruited this way provide data of comparable quality to those recruited through conventional means.
