With the increased pressure on survey researchers to achieve high response rates, it is critical to explore issues related to nonresponse. In this study, the authors examined the effects of nonresponse bias in a mail survey of physicians (N = 3,400). Because slightly more than one half of the sample did not respond to the survey, there was potential for bias if nonresponders differed significan...

Two explanations of differences in undercoverage and nonresponse between neighbourhoods in a telephone survey among the inhabitants of the City of Groningen were studied: differences in population composition between neighbourhoods or in their social disorganization. Logistic multilevel analyses were performed on a sample of 7,000 inhabitants and all 14 city neighbourhoods. Differences in under...

Earnings nonresponse is currently about 30% in the CPS-ORG and 20% in the March CPS. Census imputes missing earnings by assigning nonrespondents the reported earnings of matched donors. Even if nonresponse is random, in a wage equation there exists severe “match bias” on coefficients attached to non-match imputation attributes (union status, industry, foreign-born, etc.) and imperfectly matched...

OBJECTIVE To assess the effect of demographic and neonatal risk factors and outcome at the last available assessment on the probability of full responders, postal responders (those who only responded to the mailed questionnaire), or nonresponders in a follow-up study of 19-year-old adolescents who were born as preterm infants. DESIGN The 19-year follow-up program was part of a large ongoing c...

PURPOSE This is the first study to quantify potential nonresponse bias in a childhood cancer survivor questionnaire survey. We describe early and late responders and nonresponders, and estimate nonresponse bias in a nationwide questionnaire survey of survivors. METHODS In the Swiss Childhood Cancer Survivor Study, we compared characteristics of early responders (who answered an initial questi...

1 Summary Although similar to weighting for unit nonresponse in cross-sectional surveys, adjustment for panel non-response needs to incorporate information about nonrespondents collected in the early waves of the panel. We review different weighting adjustments for panel nonresponse and discuss methods for incorporating complex survey design variables into the weighting adjustments. We propose ...

Nonresponse is very common in survey sampling. Nonignorable nonresponse, a response mechanism in which the response probability of a survey variable Y depends directly on the value of Y regardless of whether Y is observed or not, is the most difficult type of nonresponse to handle. The population mean estimators ignoring the nonrespondents typically have heavy biases. This paper studies an empi...

In survey sampling, inverse-probability weights are used to correct for unequal selection probabilities, and poststratification weights are used to correct for known or expected discrepancies between the sample and the population (see, e.g., Kish 1992). In this research note, we consider the effects of these adjustments for household size in telephone polling. In a survey in which households ar...

Results are presented from a simulation study of alternative weighting class adjustments for nonresponse when estimating a population mean from complex sample survey data, in an effort to extend the previous work of Little and Vartivarian (2003, 2005) to a complex sample survey setting involving stratified cluster sampling from a finite target population. A total of 30 simulations were performe...