Public Opin Q. 2000 Winter;64(4):413-28. doi: 10.1086/318638.
From 1979 to 1996, the Survey of Consumer Attitudes response rate remained roughly 70 percent. But number of calls to complete an interview and proportion of interviews requiring refusal conversion doubled. Using call-record histories, we explore what the consequences of lower response rates would have been if these additional efforts had not been undertaken. Both number of calls and initially cooperating (vs. initially refusing) are related to the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS), but only number of calls survives a control for demographic characteristics. We assess the impact of excluding respondents who required refusal conversion (which reduces the response rate 5-10 percentage points), respondents who required more than five calls to complete the interview (reducing the response rate about 25 percentage points), and those who required more than two calls (a reduction of about 50 percentage points). We found no effect of excluding any of these respondent groups on cross-sectional estimates of the ICS using monthly samples of hundreds of cases. For yearly estimates, based on thousands of cases, the exclusion of respondents who required more calls (though not of initial refusers) had an effect, but a very small one. One of the exclusions generally affected estimates of change over time in the ICS, irrespective of sample size.
从 1979 年到 1996 年，消费者态度调查的回复率保持在大约 70%左右。但是，完成一次访谈所需的通话次数和需要拒绝转换的访谈比例都增加了一倍。我们利用通话记录历史，探讨如果没有采取这些额外的措施，较低的回复率会产生什么后果。通话次数和最初合作（与最初拒绝）都与消费者情绪指数（ICS）有关，但只有通话次数在控制了人口特征后仍然存在。我们评估了排除需要拒绝转换的受访者（这会使回复率降低 5-10 个百分点）、需要五次以上通话才能完成访谈的受访者（回复率降低约 25 个百分点）和需要两次以上通话的受访者（回复率降低约 50 个百分点）的影响。我们发现，在使用数百个案例的月度样本进行横截面估计时，排除这些受访者群体对 ICS 的估计没有影响。对于基于数千个案例的年度估计，排除需要更多通话的受访者（尽管不排除最初的拒绝者）会产生影响，但影响非常小。其中一个排除因素通常会影响 ICS 随时间变化的估计，而与样本大小无关。
