The Role of Topic Interest in Survey Participation Decisions
Robert M. Groves is at the University of Michigan and the Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM). Stanley Presser and Sarah Dipko are at the University of Maryland and the JPSM. The authors thank the interagency advisory committee for the 2000 Joint Program in Survey Methodology practicum (B. K. Atrostic, Susan Schecter, and Clyde Tucker), the JPSM students in the practicum, Steve Heeringa, Roger Tourangeau, Sonja Ziniel, and two anonymous reviewers, all of whom were helpful in preparing the article.
Address correspondence to Robert M. Groves (email: bgroves{at}isr.umich.edu) or Stanley Presser (e-mail: spresser{at}survey.umd.edu).
While a low survey response rate may indicate that the risk of nonresponse error is high, we know little about when nonresponse causes such error and when nonresponse is ignorable. Leverage-salience theory of survey participation suggests that when the survey topic is a factor in the decision to participate, noncooperation will cause nonresponse error. We test three hypotheses derived from the theory: (1) those faced with a survey request on a topic of interest to them cooperate at higher rates than do those less interested in the topic; (2) this tendency for the "interested" to cooperate more readily is diminished when monetary incentives are offered; and (3) the impact of interest on cooperation has nonignorability implications for key statistics. The data come from a three-factor experiment examining the impact on cooperation with surveys on (a) five different topics, using (b) samples from five different populations that have known attributes related to the topics, with (c) two different incentive conditions.
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