THE STRUCTURE OF THE REASONS FOR HARD REFUSALS IN MASS TELEPHONE SURVEYS (using the example of surveys on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict)

In mass telephone surveys of Russians on political topics, the number of categorical refusals consistently exceeds the number of successful interviews. This poses a threat of systematic bias in the samples, so it is important to study the structure of the causes of severe rejections in the materials of political polls. To do this, we asked the respondents who categorically refused to participate in the survey a question about the reason for their refusal. This question was asked to respondents who received the "hard refusal" status when requesting consent to an interview in five waves of mass telephone surveys on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict conducted from March 10 to July 30, 2022. The total volume of samples amounted to 16479 hard failures. Although the frequency of the reasons for severe refusals cited by respondents differs significantly between the survey waves, the ratio of their prevalence ranks is quite stable, which indicates the stability of the ratio of reasons for unwillingness to participate in interviews. A significant majority of those who are not ready to participate in surveys either do not think about the reasons for their unwillingness to take the questionnaire, or do not articulate these reasons (on average, 69.1% for all waves). The remaining respondents either cite employment (10.9%), or are not interested in the topic of the survey or talk about their apolitical nature (7.8%), or are afraid to participate in political polls (5.9%). The remaining reasons are indicated by single percentages.