Disentangling mode-specific selection and measurement bias in social surveys

•An experimental design that allows for a decomposition of survey mode effects.•Application of mode effect decomposition to two key surveys.•Important mode effect findings for key variables in these surveys.•Various mode effect definitions and estimation strategies.

A large-scale mixed-mode experiment linked to the Dutch Crime Victimization Survey was conducted in 2011. The experiment consisted of two waves; one wave with random assignment to one of the modes web, paper, telephone and face-to-face, and one follow-up wave to the full sample with interviewer modes only.The objective of the experiment is to estimate total mode effects and more specifically the corresponding mode effect components arising from undercoverage, nonresponse and measurement.In this paper, mode-specific selection and measurement bias are defined, and estimators for the bias terms based on the experimental design are introduced and discussed. The proposed estimators are applied to a number of key survey variables from the Labour Force Survey and the Crime Victimization Survey.