Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7.0 HOUSEHOLD SURVEY ORGANIZATION AND CONTRACTING

Note: some portions of this chapter come from the 2008 NCHRP Report 571, with contributions and review by Guy Rousseau and Jimmy Armoogum

Closely related to the design of the survey is the need to organize and manage the effort. The section summary page shows the key issues associated with the organization of the household travel/activity survey. The four issues are described in this section.

7.1 Management of the Survey Effort

The management structure of travel survey development efforts is discussed briefly in Section 4.3 of this manual. For household travel and activity surveys, the survey team managers must provide:

In almost all cases, the overall leadership role is provided by the sponsoring agency’s project manager. Increasingly, the day-to-day management of survey fieldwork is being left to survey subcontractors who are able to provide trained fieldwork staff and specialized facilities. The final management function is often provided by a combination of in-house staff and travel demand consultants.

Proper management of the household travel survey effort consists in ensuring that the survey does collect information on work and non-work travel behavior.  This includes trip generation, trip distribution, and modal choice.  This is an essential element in the transportation planning and modeling efforts for any metropolitan area.  A well managed household travel survey shall produce data that could be used to develop and calibrate travel demand models for use in travel forecasting, land use planning, and air quality planning.  The resultant data set shall be adequate to fulfill the models’ functions of estimating trip generation and distribution, mode choice, and assignments.  If properly managed, the survey and data set will serve as the foundation for an entirely new generation of travel demand models. 

The use of a peer review panel, as described in Section 4.3, is highly recommended for household travel and activity surveys. If nothing else, these panels provide an extra set of eyes to catch problems before they happen, and they are likely to provide much more, including expertise and experience with most of the challenging issues facing an agency.  Examples of a household travel survey peer review effort can be found at:

http://www.nymtc.org/project/surveys/WORKSHOP/survey_wrkshp08.html

http://www.utrc2.org/events/events.php?viewid=188

7.2 Staffing Needs for the Household Travel/Activity Survey

In the early stages of the survey design process, the survey team should scope out the most likely approach to the household survey, and then make a preliminary estimate of the labor and skill requirements of the study. When staff members’ pre-existing schedules are considered, almost all agencies that perform household surveys find the need to temporarily increase staffing. This is generally done in one of two ways:

7.2.1 Hiring Temporary Professionals for a Household Travel/Activity Survey

In most regions, temporary agencies can provide the necessary additional office support people for the survey effort. In addition, many regions have one or more universities whose students could be recruited for temporary work.

Once the temporary staff have been hired, it is essential that they receive as much on-the-job-training as possible. Household travel/activity survey workers’ strengths and weaknesses should be well-understood by survey managers prior to the beginning of the survey effort.

7.2.2 Hiring Survey Contractors for a Household Travel/Activity Survey

An easier but sometimes more costly approach to organizing the work force for a household survey is to hire a consultant to perform the survey. Usually, the consultant would be a survey research firm, or a team including such a firm. It may also be advantageous to include a transportation modeling consultant as part of the consultant team, or to have such a consultant available to the agency through a separate contract.

In most cases, the sponsoring agency will not have access to great numbers of trained fieldworkers or to special facilities for centralized telephone interviewing. Survey research firms usually have trained interviewers on their staffs and may maintain telephone interviewing facilities that provide toll-free calling throughout the survey area, CATI capability, and the opportunity for monitoring (either by in-house supervisors or from outside phones that can be used by agency personnel). Because of the need for high quality data for travel modeling purposes and for high response rates to minimize costs, it can be highly efficient to use a survey research firm.

Survey designers can identify potential survey research firms through directories maintained by a number of organizations (Lappin, Figoni and Sloan, 1994). Two such directories are:

These directories are usually available at business school libraries. In addition, the survey designer can contact other planning agencies that have recently completed similar household travel/activity survey efforts for lists of potential contractors.

The survey sponsoring agency should consider the following factors in selecting a survey research contractor:

Consulting firms with expertise in travel modeling can also provide valuable insights in the survey development process. Such consultants are able to provide an understanding of the data needs and problems associated with model development. In many cases, a consulting team with both market research and transportation firms will be hired to conduct a household survey. In others, an agency may have transportation modeling consultants available through separate arrangements. Some agencies may have sufficient transportation modeling expertise in-house, but unless they have very experienced modelers, there is no way to guarantee that the survey will be appropriate for use in developing model datasets. This has been a substantial problem in several recent surveys.

There are advantages to using qualified local consultants if they exist in the survey area. Surveyors who know the local geography will make fewer errors in recording and spelling local place names. Survey times can be shorter if location information is known to the interviewer, and respondents would be less likely to be exasperated by having to give what to them is obvious information about well known locations. In some cases, respondents may feel more comfortable speaking to interviewers with local accents and knowledge.

The main problem with using local firms is that in many areas, especially small and mid-size areas, there are few if any local firms with sufficient transportation survey knowledge and experience. If a non-local firm is performing the survey, the question then becomes how to provide the necessary local knowledge. In some cases this local knowledge can be provided by agency personnel; in others, it may have to be provided through other consultants. There have been many recent successful survey efforts conducted by non-local firms.

Survey teams have hired survey subcontractors at several different point in the household travel/activity survey implementation process. Sometimes, the contractors are brought into the process early in the survey design phase, so that the survey team can benefit from the market research experience of the survey contractor’s key staff during the evaluation and selection of the survey method, survey techniques, and quality-enhancing procedures. Other times, when the survey sponsor is comfortable with making the design decisions alone, or with the help of independent consultants, the survey subcontracting firm is not brought into the project until the final phases of questionnaire design, just before pretesting.

In either case, it is important that the sponsoring agency recognize the need to carefully delineate the responsibilities of any contractors in the Request for Proposal (RFP) and in the services contract. In preparing the RFP, agency staff should remember that any responsibilities and tasks not explicitly assigned to the contractor will most likely need to be completed by themselves. Therefore, spending extra effort on the RFP is usually worthwhile.

Because RFPs need to be tailored to individual conditions, little specific guidance can be offered on their development. In general, in developing RFPs it is helpful to review recent similar RFPs from other agencies. A list of agencies recently completing household travel/activity surveys is available in the forthcoming “FHWA Scan of Recent Travel Surveys.” The scopes-of-work from recent household travel/activity survey RFPs are shown in Appendix D of this manual.

Because of the nature of survey work, survey firms are not accustomed to establishing a final fixed contract price for a pre-selected number of “complete” households. Estimating contact rates, response rates, interview times, and even the number of surveys needed for specific analyses are usually very difficult prior to the completion of a high-quality pretest. Setting a fixed price prior to that point, while beneficial from a resources planning perspective and an agency procurement perspective, can lead to problems later in the survey. For instance, pretests tend to become pro-forma tasks, rather than opportunities for careful review of procedures and for trying innovative procedures, because if the survey cost is fixed, there is no incentive to look very hard for potential problems.

To avoid these potential problems, it is recommended that agencies consider one or more of the following approaches:

7.3 Agency Coordination

The need for coordinating travel survey and demand modeling efforts with other local agencies is described in Chapter 4.0. Because the household survey is likely to be the most important survey effort performed in a region, and because household surveys are not (or at least have not been) done on a regular basis, it is essential that agencies work cooperatively on the design and implementation issues.

As soon as possible in the household travel/activity survey development process, the sponsoring agency should contact:

These agencies should be briefed on the survey plans, and should be provided with the Statement of Goals for the survey. Representatives of these agencies should be invited to participate in the survey development process, and to identify ways in which the survey data could help their organizations’ planning efforts. Many household travel/activity surveys can be easily adapted to provide useful data to many different agencies. However, it is essential that potential data coordination activities be identified early in the survey design effort to minimize the disruption and amount of necessary re-design.

It is important to obtain some "buy-in" from local planning partners and regional stakeholders, prior to undertaking the household travel survey, in order to ensure proper cooperation, coordination and collaboration throughout the duration of the survey.  An oversight advisory board including stakeholders could be formed at the beginning of the survey conceptualization process, so that proper follow-up and management of the survey becomes a successful endeavor.  

7.4 Advance Publicity

The survey designer needs to decide whether and how to publicize the household survey. Generally, telephone-based survey methods are helped by advance publicity. Potential respondents are more likely to believe that a telephone interviewer is legitimate if they have heard that the study would be going on. In addition, respondents are likely to attach a higher level of importance to a survey effort that has been publicized, and therefore consider participating to be more important. A few recent telephone-mail-telephone household survey efforts ran into some criticism in part because the efforts were not well-publicized before they began.

If, for some reason, a survey team is using an in-home interview survey method, they may not want to consider publicizing the effort. The 1973 Travel Survey Manual counsels:

“Especially in large urban areas where there is the problem of individuals posing as interviewers to gain entrance into households for other purposes, it is often best not to notify the public at large.”

In fact, the potential for this type of abuse is one good reason to avoid in-home methods.

Despite the fact that there are documented reports of thieves posing as household travel/activity survey telephone and in-person interviewers, most agencies sponsoring recent household travel/activity surveys have chosen to use some advance publicity. If advance publicity is determined to be necessary or appropriate, the following efforts could be included:

 

REFERENCES

These and other sources are described by Jane Lappin, Paula Figoni, and Suzanne Sloan in A Primer on Consumer Marketing Research: Procedures, Methods and Tools (March 1994).

U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, Urban Origin-Destination Surveys, Washington, D.C., 1973 (reprinted 1975), p. 26.