The paper offers an overview of the strategies adopted by the European National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) to mitigate the phenomenon of decreasing response rates. It enriches the analysis presenting recent findings of the different types of burden experienced by the survey respondents, and the possible implications on the response rates and associated biases.

More specifically, this paper focuses on the techniques used by NSIs to recruit respondents for the Household Budget Survey (HBS) and the Time Use Survey (TUS) in the European countries. Over the past two decades, both diary-based surveys have suffered from decreasing response rates. Therefore, the paper outlines the main characteristics of non-respondents, as well as the most common reasons for non-response.

Furthermore, the paper presents national policies to boost response rates and to reduce respondent burden at various steps of the survey process: from the recruitment phase, through the fieldwork, to the successful completion of the survey. Different aspects are examined, as the communication strategy, the survey accessibility, the use of mixed modes and innovative tools (web diaries and smartphone apps), the use of different types of incentives, and the role of interviewers.

Finally, the paper provides a few recommendations for the future implementations of these two diary-based surveys.

The study was commissioned by Eurostat, in the framework of the project on “Innovative tools and sources for HBS and TUS”.