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Chapter 4
Response Rates

Household Interview

The survey period began in March 1997 and, with a two-month break in July and August, ended on December 6, 1997. The study completed interviews with 2,380 child households and 3,563 children. Six hundred and nine African American children were added to this sample with funds from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation. The response rate was 90% for those families regularly interviewed in the core PSID and 84% for those contacted the first time this year for the immigrant refresher to the sample. The combined response rate for both groups was 88%. Table 3 shows the response rates. The reason the response rate to the child questionnaire (child assessments) is only 79.5% is that about one-tenth of the families were out of range of our interviewers and were not close enough to at least two other eligible families to justify the high cost of traveling to obtain that case. An interview was conducted by telephone to obtain the other parts of the interview so that the information from parents and teachers would be available. We identified more absent fathers than expected (36% of children had an absent father), but were able to obtain interviews with fewer. For schools from whose administrators we did not receive a response, we plan to obtain supplemental information from public data bases such as the Quality of Education Data (QED).

¹Excluding those we did not seek to interview (in jail, deceased, non-sample, foreign)

Fathers Living Outside the Target Child's Home

In 1997, the total number of CDS households with children under age 13 was 2,380; the total number of children was 3,563. We identified 1,431 children with absent fathers in 1,005 households in the PSID.

Of these 1,431 children:

20%

283

have completed absent father interviews.

7%	97	the father refused the interview.
3%	46	the R could not be reached for conversion (soft refusal)
1%	13	someone else in the father's household refused the interview.
11%	156	refusals from the father's household

31%

439

the primary caregiver refused to provide information on the father.

5%	75	we had a phone number but never were able to contact anyone
22%	318	lost - we made one attempt at tracking but could not locate the father
2%	23	other - not finally determined
29%	416	could not locate

The following we did not attempt to contact:

5%	68	are in jail. We did not attempt to interview these men.
1%	12	are deceased.
3%	50	were determined not to be absent fathers
0%	7	are foreign
9%	137	no attempt was made to contact these respondents

100%	1431 children

Figure 4-1. Absent Father Contact Results

Deleting from the total sample those we did not seek to interview (in jail, deceased, non-sample, and foreign), we have 1,294 cases. The response rate from these 1,294 cases is 22% for children's absent fathers. Mothers refused in 34% of the cases, 32% were not located, and 12% were refusals by the father's household. See Figure 4-1.

Of those fathers whom we were able to contact (452), the response rate was 64%:

64%	283	completed interviews
36%	161	the father's household refused
100%	444	fathers' households actually contacted

Once we reached the father, cooperation was 64%. The main stumbling blocks were obtaining information from the mothers and tracking the fathers.

We are coding the reasons the primary caregiver reports for refusing to provide information on the father. These include such reasons as "he never sees the child; doesn't know where he is; doesn't know the father; does not want the father to know about the child; a child of rape," etc. We end our contact efforts at this point. Obtaining the mother's cooperation is key to locating absent fathers.

The 416 (29%) children's fathers for whom we obtained some information from the primary caregiver but were not able to contact the father is a number that could be altered. We did not have the funding to track these fathers, but assume that such efforts could be successful.

Finally, fathers of 68 children are in jail/prison. We had not budgeted to interview these men. They are a "captive" audience; it should be possible to interview them with additional time and funding. Permission from the prison administration is usually required.

Given that the focus of the CDS interview with the absent father is his involvement with the child, absent fathers who have not been in contact with their child over the past year will provide little additional information over that provided by the mother on frequency and extent of contact. The loss of these hard-to-reach groups of men does not compromise our particular study. However, these parameters should be helpful to researchers with different purposes.

School/Daycare Questionnaires

     Table 4. Response Rates for Elementary, Preschool and Daycare Questionnaires

	Baseline (Number Eligible)	Number	Percent
Elementary/Middle School Teacher	2141	1109	51.79%
Elementary Teacher/Middle School Student Time Diary	2141	1213	56.65%
Preschool/Daycare Teacher	448	172	38.39%
Preschool/Daycare Teacher Time Diary	448	154	34.37%
Home-based Care Provider	415	136	32.77%
Home-based Care Provider Time Diary	415	119	28.67%
Elementary/Middle School Administrator	2141	705	32.92%
Preschool/Daycare Administrator	448	140	31.25%

* The PCG Child Questionnaire (Sections G and H) was used to determine the baselines for these response rates.
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