A Second Chance at Response: A Multimode Reinterview Analysis Using Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health

Traditionally administered in-person, restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the National Survey on Drug Use and Health to transition to a multimode survey that offers a self-administered web option prior to in-person data collection. A relatively small portion of respondents who began the survey on the web but broke off prior to completing were later readministered the survey (from the beginning) in-person. We refer to these as “second chance” respondents. The aim of this in-brief note is to report the individual-level mode discrepancies these second chance respondents exhibited with respect to lifetime use of cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana. In addition to higher-than-anticipated discrepancy rates overall, we found directional differences that run contrary to what would be expected from the literature on survey mode effects. Second chance respondents are more than 15 percentage points more likely to report ever smoking cigarettes or using marijuana than web-only respondents.