The Bank of Canada's 2009 methods-of-payment survey

The annual value share of cash in retail payments dropped from a level of more than 50 per cent in 1990 to 20 per cent in 2009.1 The decline of cash and the rise of debit and credit cards have been partially due to the introduction of debit card payments at the point of sale and the competitive edge afforded by a variety of credit card reward schemes. [...] The diary The SD was limited to three days, since other diary studies have found strong fatigue after the first few days of transaction recording.6 The diary had three sections: • The front section collected information about the amount of cash by denomination (coins and bank notes) and the number and types of cards participants carried in their wallets. [...] The members of the online panel accessed and submitted the survey material on the Internet, and the members of the mail panel received the material on paper and mailed it back by post. [...] From the online panel, 5,701 SQs were collected, together with 2,238 completed SDs,9 and 1,167 completed SQs and SDs from the mail panel.10 The editing phase of the survey garnered complete data for the majority of the SQs. [...] In the final data set, the proportion of missing answers was below 0.5 per cent for almost all SQ questions.11 To guarantee the quality of the SD responses, SDs were eliminated from the sample if less than 70 per cent of the mandatory questions had a valid response.