Analysis of Nonresponse Bias in the 2010 Post-Election Survey of Uniformed Service

• Activity Number: 141
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, July 30, 2012 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): David McGrath*+ and Tim Markham
• Companies: and Department of Defense
• Keywords: Nonresponse Bias ; Voting ; Military ; UOCAVA

Abstract

In an era of declining response rates, survey organizations are increasingly examining the effects of nonresponse bias on their survey estimates. As fewer people respond to surveys, the nonresponse bias increases if survey respondents and nonrespondents are systematically different from each other, even after we apply sophisticated weighting methods to account for survey nonresponse. To assess the prevalence of this bias in estimates from the Federal Voting Assistance Program Post-Election Voting Survey of Uniformed Service Members, we performed a non-response bias study by surveying a random sub-sample of survey nonrespondents. Because we interviewed the nonresponse sample by telephone and the production survey was a self-administered, Web instrument, we also selected a sub-sample of the production sample for phone interviews to test for mode effects. Results show that modest mode effec