Difficulty to Reach Respondents and Nonresponse Bias: Evidence from Large Government Surveys
43 Pages Posted: 7 Apr 2016 Last revised: 17 Jan 2018
There are 2 versions of this paper
Difficulty to Reach Respondents and Nonresponse Bias: Evidence from Large Government Surveys
Difficulty to Reach Respondents and Nonresponse Bias: Evidence from Large Government Surveys
Date Written: December 20, 2017
Abstract
How high is unemployment? How low is labor force participation? Is obesity more prevalent among men? How large are household expenditures? We study the sources of the relevant official statistics --- the Current Population Survey (CPS), the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), and the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) --- and find that the answers depend on whether we look at easy- or at difficult-to-reach respondents, measured by the number of call and visit attempts made by interviewers. A challenge to the (conditionally-)random-nonresponse assumption, these findings empirically substantiate the theoretical warning against making population-wide estimates from surveys with low response rates.
Keywords: nonresponse bias, selection bias, survey data, difficulty of reaching, contact attempts, number of calls, paradata
JEL Classification: C18, C83, J60, I18
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation