The Survey Geek

Tag: Response Rates

  • There you go again!

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    RegBaker
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    One hears lots of silly things said at MR conferences and one of the silliest and oft-repeated refrains is that you can't do surveys with probability samples any more. There are even those who say that you never could. As often as I get the chance I point out that that's total nonsense. Lots of…

  • Those pesky robo-polls

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    RegBaker
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    A new issue of Survey Practice is out and among the short articles is one by Jan van Lohuizen and Robert Wayne Samohyl titled "Method Effects and Robo-calls." (Some colleagues and I also have a short piece on placement of navigation buttons in Web surveys.) Like most people I know I have little regard for…

  • Let’s get on with it

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    RegBaker
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    I spent some time over the weekend putting the finishing touches on a presentation for later this week in Washington at a workshop being put on by the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council. The workshop is part of a larger effort to develop a new agenda for research into social science…

  • Getting straight on response rates

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    RegBaker
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    AAPOR's Standard Definitions: Final Dispositions of Case Codes and Outcome Rates for Surveys has long been the bible for survey researchers interested in systematically tracking response and nonresponse in surveys and summarizing those outcomes in standardized ways that help us judge the strengths and weaknesses of survey results. The first edition, published in 1998, built…

  • Balancing risk and reward in survey incentives

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    RegBaker
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    The current issue of Survey Practice has an interesting little piece on the use of lottery incentives in online surveys. (Here I quickly point out that the correct terminology should be "sweepstakes" since there are legal issues around anyone but governmental entities running lotteries, but let's not get distracted by that.) In self-administered surveys like…

  • Hoisted on their own petard

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    RegBaker
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    The current issue of Inside Research is out and it includes the mid-year update on online spending. Despite the headline that characterizes the growth as "soft" the numbers show the MR companies reporting to IR (and mine is one) estimating that their 2010 revenues from online will be around $2.2 billion, a 12 percent increase…

  • A Puzzle

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    RegBaker
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    The latest issue of POQ has a meta-analysis by Bob Groves and Emilia Peytcheva that looks at the impact of nonresponse rates on nonresponse bias.  It's primary finding is now familiar: we can expect significant nonresponse bias "when the causes of participation are highly correlated with the survey variables."  In other words, if we do…