Talk:Response rate (survey)

Rate or proportion?
Re:1,000 surveys were sent by mail, and 257 were successfully completed (entirely) and returned, then the response rate would be 25.7%.

Although used overwhelmingly as a rate even by scientific community, isn't it mathematically 'response percentage/proportion'? Rates require time component in addition to numerator and denominator. For example, if 1,000 surveys were sent by mail, and 257 were successfully completed and returned within 10 days, then the response rate would be 2.57% per day, while the response proportion would be 0.257 or 25.7%.

I would appreciate more discussion. BikashDai (talk) 17:38, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Surveys
What is a high response rate?

Depends somewhat on the context, but for survey data to be reliable you should be aiming at 50% or more of the target population to be confident that your statistics are correct.

Surveys rely on a random sample of the target population and if the response rate is too low then the sample is probably not random.

For instance in a telephone survey of the US and you normally get 45% response rate (45% of people called complete the survey questions) but you run a poll in the middle of the superbowl or 2am in the morning and the response rate drops to 10%, then the sample is skewed - thos e 10% who complete are different from the other 90% of the telephone owning population in some way. GrantB 02:38, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

This "it now seems clear that a low response rate does not guarantee lower survey accuracy and instead simply indicates a risk of lower accuracy" sentence is totally ridiculous. What the preceding paragraphs established is that a low response rate doesn't mean the surveys are wrong. Just consider this: lets say I tell you the length of something 10mm+-1mm. If you then measured the object and found that it was 10mm+-0.000001mm long. Does this mean that my first measurement was actually more accurate than I said it was? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.205.98.5 (talk) 01:25, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I removed the ridiculous link created by survey creators, for survey creators and quoted by nobody who studies the reliability and science of the studies. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.120.156.94 (talk) 04:27, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Biased to market research - needs to better address medicine
Should change lead to be more balanced as to the two separate domains this term is used in. - Rod57 (talk) 07:00, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Lead no longer mentions the medical use at all. - Rod57 (talk) 14:08, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

Is it true that surveys with lower response rates yield more accurate measurements than surveys with higher response rates?
It is stated that "One early example of a finding was reported by Visser, Krosnick, Marquette and Curtin (1996) who showed that surveys with lower response rates (near 20%) yielded more accurate measurements than did surveys with higher response rates (near 60 or 70%).[2] ", Is this actually a conclusion the authors drew? I have not the read the article, but the abstract indicates that the authors compare mail surveys with low response rates with telephone surveys with high response rates. If that is the case the statement is extremely misleading, since the result probably have nothing to do with the response rate. If it has something to do with the response rate (for the same types of survey), please indicate why it generally would be better if fewer persons answer a survey. Abstract pasted below.

MAIL SURVEYS FOR ELECTION FORECASTING? AN EVALUATION OF THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH POLL PENNY S. VISSER, JON A. KROSNICK, JESSE MARQUETTE and MICHAEL CURTIN

Abstract Because of slow turnaround time and typically low response rates, mail surveys have generally been considered of little value in election forecasting. However, statewide mail surveys conducted by the Columbus Dispatch newspaper since 1980 have made remarkably accurate forecasts of Ohio election outcomes. In comparison to statewide surveys by two other organizations employing conventional telephone interview methods, the mail surveys were consistently more accurate and were generally less susceptible to sources of inaccuracy such as high rolloff and low publicity. The mail survey's advantage is attributable at least in part to larger sample sizes, sampling and response procedures that yielded more representative samples of voters, lack of the need to allocate undecided respondents, and superior questionnaire design. These findings suggest that mail surveys not only may be viable alternatives to telephone surveys but may actually be superior to them under some conditions. Further-more, these results demonstrate that surveys with low response rates are not necessarily low in validity.

Rename to Response rate (survey)
Could rename/move this to Response rate (survey) to avoid clinical trials and signal processing confusion ? - Rod57 (talk) 01:56, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
 * No objections, and no/few links to old name so have done the move. - Rod57 (talk) 14:05, 24 May 2016 (UTC)