TY - JOUR
T1 - Difficulty of Reaching Respondents and Nonresponse Bias
T2 - Evidence from Large Government Surveys
AU - Heffetz, Ori
AU - Reeves, Daniel B.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
PY - 2019/3/1
Y1 - 2019/3/1
N2 - 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, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, and the Consumer Expenditure Survey-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.
AB - 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, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, and the Consumer Expenditure Survey-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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85062511163&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1162/rest_a_00748
DO - 10.1162/rest_a_00748
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AN - SCOPUS:85062511163
SN - 0034-6535
VL - 101
SP - 176
EP - 191
JO - Review of Economics and Statistics
JF - Review of Economics and Statistics
IS - 1
ER -