Trends in U.S. Face-To-Face Household Survey Nonresponse and Level of Effort

Research on nonresponse in face-to-face surveys in the United States has shown that nonresponse increases over time for most surveys, but there are also periods of fairly stable rates. Surprisingly, nonresponse for face-to-face surveys has not been as widely studied recently as compared to telephone surveys. The focus on telephone surveys may be due to the dramatic increase in nonresponse for these surveys or perhaps because face-to-face surveys still achieve relatively high levels of response. This paper updates nonresponse trends for face-to-face household surveys conducted in the United States since 2000. The review provides a comprehensive picture of the industry by including surveys conducted by government, private, and academic organizations. The relative role of refusals and noncontacts in the total nonresponse is also presented. We tie the trends in nonresponse with data on the level of effort for some of these surveys. Many researchers have suggested that extra effort has been needed to prevent response rates from falling even more precipitously but lacked the effort data to evaluate this hypothesis for face-to-face surveys. Some data on field effort are becoming available, so this question can be addressed for the first time across more than one survey. To complete the picture, we also look at loss over time for longitudinal face-to-face surveys.