I Hear You Knocking But You Can't Come In

Robert Fitzgerald and Linda Fuller
Additional contact information
Robert Fitzgerald: University of California, Berkeley
Linda Fuller: University of California, Berkeley

Sociological Methods & Research, 1982, vol. 11, issue 1, 3-32

Abstract: This article examines the effects of refusers and reluctant respondents to a general population survey on estimates of population distributions and multivariate relationships. Our data indicate that refusers do not constitute a simple random sample of respondents, and that efforts to correct for nonresponse by positing a “continuum of resistance†with refusers assumed to resemble reluctant respondents is not justified. Furthermore, we find that refusers and reluctant respondents can have serious effects on estimates of the relationship among variables. We do this by using analysis of covariance to assess the effect of callbacks on sample estimates and an imputation technique that can be used routinely in personal interview surveys to detect the magnitude and significance of refusal bias on final sample estimates.

Date: 1982
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0049124182011001001 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:somere:v:11:y:1982:i:1:p:3-32

DOI: 10.1177/0049124182011001001

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Methods & Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().