Survey fieldwork budgets: price recruitment through to accepted interviews

A market-research quote for 400 interviews needs to explain who qualifies, what counts as complete and which quality checks apply. The supplier may need to contact or screen many more people than the final sample contains. Price the recruitment path to the accepted output rather than assuming every invited person produces one billable interview.

AAPOR distinguishes response, cooperation and completion rates and provides standardized outcome definitions. A fieldwork budget should also label each denominator explicitly. In this guide, screening participation means completed screeners divided by invitations, eligibility means qualified respondents divided by completed screeners, and interview completion means completed interviews divided by qualified respondents. These are defined planning measures, not a claim to calculate a particular AAPOR response-rate formula.

Agree the target population, quotas, questionnaire length, language, delivery mode and acceptance process before comparing prices. A cheaper sample can be a different research product if it uses easier eligibility criteria or omits a difficult subgroup. Finance should preserve the research specification rather than altering it to make the recruitment budget balance.

Record the expected number of invitations, attempted contacts where relevant, completed screeners, eligible people, interview starts, completed interviews and accepted records. Where a supplier uses different labels, ask for a mapping. The buyer needs to understand whether a charge applies to a contact attempt, a screened-out person or a final accepted interview.

Specify how quota-full respondents and duplicate submissions are handled. Someone may meet the broad eligibility criteria yet belong to a subgroup that is already complete. That creates recruitment work without another required interview. Keep those cases distinct from people who were never eligible for the target population.

Clarify incentive obligations separately from the supplier's service fee. Compensation can depend on the participation agreement and the work the respondent completed. A buyer's rejection of a record does not automatically establish that the participant should receive nothing. Preserve the agreed terms and let the research team apply the approved quality process fairly.

Assume a hypothetical project needs 400 completed interviews and, for the initial budget, all completed interviews are expected to pass the agreed checks. If 80% of eligible respondents complete, the project needs 500 eligible respondents. At 20% eligibility among completed screeners, it needs 2,500 completed screeners. If half of invited people complete the screener, it needs 5,000 invitations.

Suppose screening costs $1 per completed screener, the incentive and completion-related variable cost is $12 per finished interview, and fixed setup costs $1,000. The budget is $2,500 plus $4,800 plus $1,000, totaling $8,300, or $20.75 per completed interview on that scope. These are hypothetical costs and rates, not market benchmarks.

If eligibility is only 10% with other assumptions unchanged, required screeners double to 5,000 and invitations to 10,000. Screening cost rises to $5,000, bringing the budget to $10,800, or $27 per completed interview. The $2,500 increase comes from finding the eligible people, even though the requested final interview count has not changed.

An early fieldwork check can show whether screening participation, eligibility or completion differs from the estimate. Review those stages separately. A long questionnaire may affect completion, while a narrowly defined occupation may affect eligibility. Asking for one blended conversion percentage can conceal which part of the process needs attention.

Inspect subgroup progress as well as the overall average. Easy quotas may fill first, leaving expensive or scarce groups for the remaining fieldwork. The first hundred completed interviews may therefore understate the cost and time needed for the last hundred. A revised forecast should use the remaining quota mix, not simply extrapolate the early average.

The researcher must assess whether a proposed recruitment-source change remains consistent with the study's design. A lower acquisition cost does not by itself justify mixing populations or methods without disclosure. Document authorized changes and their implications before accepting a revised commercial estimate.

Set a spending or fieldwork checkpoint before the supplier exhausts the approved budget. Specify which evidence triggers a revised quote and who can authorize further recruitment. That gives the buyer a real decision while time remains, instead of presenting an unavoidable overrun after all the additional interviews have been commissioned.

AAPOR's disclosure standards address screening and validity checks, including checks for duplicate or fabricated participation. Agree the relevant checks and evidence before fieldwork. The supplier should know which outcomes count toward acceptance and how a dispute about a rejected record will be reviewed.

If some completed interviews fail the approved checks, the final accepted count can be lower than the completed count used in the initial budget. Model the replacement work where required, with any additional recruitment and incentive costs supported by the agreement. Do not simply relabel rejected records as complete to avoid exceeding the budget.

Keep enough audit information to explain acceptance while limiting personal data to what the research process genuinely needs. Finance usually needs counts, cost categories and approved exceptions rather than detailed respondent identities or sensitive answers. The research owner should control access to the underlying participant information.

Compare the delivered sample with the agreed quotas, accepted count and documented changes. Then reconcile the billed screening, interview, incentive and setup components to the pricing basis. A fixed-fee quote may allocate volume risk differently from a cost-per-complete agreement, so the final invoice must follow the arrangement actually approved.

Retain the original assumptions, pilot findings, authorized amendments and final stage counts. They explain whether a variance came from rarity of the target population, participation, questionnaire completion, quality exclusions or scope expansion. That evidence improves the next research purchase without pretending that a low price per interview alone establishes useful or representative research.