Generations and Gender Survey Belgium Wave 1

Method: Face-to-Face (personal interview). Technique: Computer-Assisted (CAPI).

1. Interviewers

• Interviewer training: Interviewers were informed about general basic rules of interviewing. During the training, the following topics were dealt with: contacting procedure, confidentiality issues, before interview protocols (including techniques to persuade contacts to participate to the survey), interviewing method and best practices. Interviewers were also provided with relevant documentation concerning the survey.
• Control of performance: To monitor the work of interviewers during the fieldwork, a follow-up was organized on a weekly basis, through the so-called "group monitor". In case of doubt about the work and the good intentions of the interviewer, he/she could be asked to give his/her group to another interviewer.

2. Contact protocols 2.1 Advance letter: No. Interviewers could announce their visit visit by a letter. But this was not compulsory. 2.2 Cold contacts: Face-to-Face 2.3 Scheduling / scattering: Yes. To get the highest response rate, contacts attempts were scattered over different days of the week and different parts of the day. 2.4 Contact history: Yes. For each contact attempt, the interviewer had to report the date, the time and the outcome in a contact form. 2.5 Min number of contacts: 3 (at least one time at the individual's home, at least one time in the evening and one in the weekend). 2.6 Max number of contacts: 10.

3. Questionnaire localization

• Pre-test: a pilot study was carried out in June 2007, on a random sample of N=1000. However, only 107 individuals accepted to participate and, of them, only 72 were actually interviewed. As a result, the pilot was really biased in terms of age and education profiles. This experience suggested asking respondent with an informed consent form.
• Lenght of interviews: median duration equal to 69 minutes. The optional modules on "Housing" and "Nationality & Ethnicity" were only partially implemented in Belgium. The “Housing” module overlaps with the Belgian censuses that are carried out since 2001. In order to make the GGS international questionnaire compliant with the Belgian National Law, some questions have been modified/omitted. Some response categories have been modified. Once translated in French, Dutch and German, the questionnaire was not re-translated back in English.