By Steve Syre
Direct phone contact with members helped lift the LeadingAge Member Survey response rate to a record level.
LeadingAge called on 4 gerontology graduate students at the University of Massachusetts Boston this summer when it wanted to maximize response rates for its 2019 LeadingAge Member Survey.
The students, recruited and supervised by the Boston office of the LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston, were assigned to make contact with members and help them respond to the survey request. The LTSS Center is a collaboration between LeadingAge and the UMass Boston Gerontology Institute.
Each student called at least 1,000 LeadingAge members and often followed up with emails or additional calls over a period of about 5 weeks in July and August. The students resent e-survey links, answered questions, and provided LeadingAge with feedback on the survey process, based on their conversations with members.
When the work was complete, LeadingAge had achieved a 36% survey response rate. It was the highest-ever response rate for a survey distributed to the entire LeadingAge membership.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR STUDENT RESEARCH
“One of the direct benefits of the LeadingAge-UMass Boston collaboration has been our ability to have students work with us on research projects,” said Adrienne Ruffin, vice president of LTSS Center Strategic Initiatives. “We work closely with the Gerontology Institute to make sure there’s a good match between the skills and interest of the students and our projects.”
The work of reaching out to LeadingAge members was overseen by Pamela Nadash, an associate professor of gerontology at UMass Boston and a fellow at the LTSS Center. Nadash said the assignment provided students useful work experience as well as additional income for the summer.
“We were excited to provide students with an opportunity to contribute to an important piece of research, which helps us understand changes the industry is experiencing and collect basic information on LeadingAge member characteristics,” said Nadash. “The feedback was that the hard work and diligence of the students bore fruit as the survey response rate suggests.”
STUDENT RESEARCHERS WITH BROAD INTERESTS
UMass Boston’s student survey team was comprised of 3, second-year gerontology Ph.D. students and a fourth student studying for her master’s degree. The students included:
- Taylor Jansen of Ottawa, IL, whose research interests include aging policy, population aging, and environmental influences on health and rural health.
- Remona Kanyat of Somerville, MA, a master’s student interested in researching housing and homelessness in older adults, and mental health.
- Yan Lin, who came to Boston from Beijing, China, where she received a Master of Law in Demography degree and a Ph.D. in Gerontology at Renmin University.
- Molly Wylie of Santa Monica, CA. Her research interests include home and community-based services, home care quality, the direct care workforce, and environmental gerontology.
THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE
Like her student colleagues, Kanyat found the survey project rewarding because it contributed useful knowledge about many aging organizations and the impact of the services they provide across the country.
The work of making thousands of calls to LeadingAge members also gave students a national eldercare perspective, which they developed through their review of extensive local detail.
“We often conduct research at our desks and behind our laptops, but our work can and should reach rural Alabama, southern California, and the Rocky Mountains, just as it does here in Boston,” said Wylie. “Working on the survey was a way to ‘tour the country’ with respect to elder service providers.”
The students also said they developed better organizational skills as they worked with the LeadingAge survey team in Washington to collect and manage so much information while trying to improve the survey process.
“I enjoyed brainstorming with the LeadingAge team in Washington on how to improve survey completion and reach more members without burdening them,” said Jansen.
Lin discovered her brief work for LeadingAge is helping her connect with others as she explores new study and volunteer opportunities at housing and care organizations.
“When you mention the work you’ve done with LeadingAge, people feel naturally close to you,” she said. “That’s happened twice already.”