Difficulty to Reach Respondents and Nonresponse Bias: Evidence from Large Government Surveys / Ori Heffetz, Daniel B. Reeves.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Heffetz, Ori.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Reeves, Daniel B.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w22333.

NBER working paper series no. w22333

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Difficulty to Reach Respondents and Nonresponse Bias

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2016.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Print version record

June 2016.