High Response Rates Hurt Data Quality

High Response Rates Hurt Data Quality

An irony of survey researchers’ obsession with high response rates is that higher response rates often hurt data quality.  How can that be?  It happens because aggressive recruiting boosts the participation of people who provide less reliable information.  Two academic articles published in a special issue of Public Opinion Quarterly on “total survey error” nicely…

A Statistically Significant Cartoon

A Statistically Significant Cartoon

In Turning Data into Stories we pointed out that numbers have no inherent meaning.  There are no essentially big or small or significant numbers, for example—they only become big or small or significant within the context of specific research questions and a range of possible answers. The same is true for p-values by which we…