Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Survey design, incentives and follow-up all play a significant role in obtaining a strong survey response rate. Professor Lesley Andres explains how to enhance response rates.

Social surveys --- Response rate.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Survey design, incentives and follow-up all play a significant role in obtaining a strong survey response rate. Professor Lesley Andres explains how to enhance response rates.

Social surveys --- Response rate.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Because both scholars and policymakers draw from military personnel survey results, survey participants need to be representative of the population. This research examined response rates for several major online U.S. Department of Defense military personnel surveys and found that younger service members, particularly younger enlisted personnel, tend to have very low response rates, even when surveys that are only 50 percent complete are defined as completed. The authors identify possible explanations, including military- and nonmilitary-specific situational and technological barriers and motivational factors. Low response rates do not necessarily yield results with bias. No minimum response rate has ever been established as a scientific threshold for minimizing nonresponse bias. Strategies to increase response rates can be costly, and previous research shows that they might not necessarily change the results in any perceptible or practically significant way. Thus, the authors propose ways to first understand how well surveys are capturing a representative sample of service members. Weighting the data along demographic characteristics might correct for some biases, but significant gaps in attitudes and experiences could remain. If nonresponse biases are present, the authors recommend reporting the limitations along with the results and identifying the factors that contribute to the bias (e.g., lack of access, trust) so that the survey researchers and sponsors invest only in recruitment strategies that would actually target the source of the problem and not just exacerbate it.

Social surveys --- Soldiers --- Response rate.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Sampling (Statistics) --- Social surveys --- Response rate

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

"Past approaches to correcting for unit nonresponse in sample surveys by re-weighting the data assume that the problem is ignorable within arbitrary subgroups of the population. Theory and evidence suggest that this assumption is unlikely to hold, and that household characteristics such as income systematically affect survey compliance. The authors show that this leaves a bias in the re-weighted data and they propose a method of correcting for this bias. The geographic structure of nonresponse rates allows them to identify a micro compliance function, which they then use to re-weight the unit-record data. An example is given for the U.S. Current Population Surveys, 1998-2004. The authors find, and correct for, a strong household income effect on response probabilities. "--World Bank web site.

Demographic surveys --- Social surveys --- Econometric models. --- Response rate