Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on October 27, 2007
Public Opinion Quarterly 2007 71(4):539-559; doi:10.1093/poq/nfm042
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From Agenda Setting to Refusal Setting
Survey Nonresponse as a Function of Media Coverage Across the 2004 Election Cycle
Address correspondence to Natalie Jomini Stroud; e-mail: tstroud{at}mail.utexas.edu.
Past research suggests that there is a relationship between survey response and topic salience, namely that individuals responding to a survey are likely to find the survey topic more salient than nonrespondents do. For election surveys, nonresponse resulting from a lack of salience can influence findings because respondents may be more interested in politics than nonrespondents. The agenda-setting model suggests that media coverage should heighten salience. Thus, as media coverage of political campaigns increases over the course of an election, refusals to a political survey should decline. Using data from the National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), which was conducted nearly continuously in 2004, this study investigates the issue of nonresponse in a random digit dial telephone survey across the election cycle by examining daily changes in the refusal rates using time-series analysis. Content analyses of the frequencies of presidential campaign stories mentioned in the New York Times and three network news broadcasts were matched against a time series from the NAES to demonstrate that increases in media coverage of the election were negatively related to the survey refusal rate.
Received for publication January 15, 2005. Revision received March 18, 2007. Accepted for publication May 14, 2007.
The author's final changes have been incorporated.
NATALIE JOMINI STROUD is with the University of Texas at Austin, Department of Communication Studies, 1 University Station A1105, Austin, TX 78712-0115, USA. KATE KENSKI is with the University of Arizona, Department of Communication, 1103 E. University Blvd. Communication Building #25, Room 211, Tucson, AZ 85721-0025, USA.