The Decline in Survey Response: A Social Values Interpretation

Theoretical understanding of survey nonresponse is implicitly heavily behaviourist, concentrating upon researchers' inputs such as follow-up arrangements, and predetermining social role characteristics of sample listings. With the decline over time in response rates, however, the possible importance of social values concerning privacy invasion has been more seriously entertained by methodologists. The paper describes evidence indicating that, in both the USA and Canada, the post-1960's decline in response is not accounted for simply by input explanations. A privacy index is generated by content analyzing British, Canadian, and American newspapers for privacy-related objections to the decennial census. Decade and country, scored according to the privacy index, are then entered into an empirical model for predicting response rate on a survey.