DEMONSTRATING A LINK BETWEEN NONRESPONSE BIAS AND MEASUREMENT ERROR

Survey researchers have long speculated that there may be a link between nonresponse and measurement error—that is, people likely to become nonrespondents to a survey are also likely to make poor reporters if they do take part. Still, there is surprisingly little evidence of such a link. It could be that nonresponse is generally the product of one set of factors and reporting errors, the product of an unrelated set, or both nonresponse and reporting errors may be itemspecific so that no general relationship between the two is likely to emerge. Our study examined a situation in which we thought there would be a link between response propensities and the propensity to give inaccurate answers. We asked samples of voters and nonvoters to take part in a survey that included items about voting. Past research shows that nonvoters misreport that fact and that they are less likely than voters in general to take part in surveys. We thought we could heighten the differences between voters and nonvoters in both response ROGER TOURANGEAU is a research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, and the director of the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. ROBERT M. GROVES is the director of the U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC, USA; at the time the work reported here was done, he was the director of the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, and a research professor at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. CLEO D. REDLINE is a Ph.D. candidate at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. The work reported here was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES 550385: “The Effects of Survey Presentation on Nonignorable Nonresponse and Measurement Error”) to Roger Tourangeau and Robert Groves. The authors are grateful to the NSF for its support and especially to Cheryl Eavey. The National Science Foundation is not responsible for the conclusions presented here. The authors thank Jim Iatrow and Lloyd Hemingway for their help in implementing the study and Courtney Kennedy for her numerous contributions to the work. *Address correspondence to Roger Tourangeau, JPSM, 1218 LeFrak Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA; e-mail: RTourang@survey.umd. edu. Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 3, Fall 2010, pp. 413–432 doi: 10.1093/poq/nfq004 Advance Access published on March 16, 2010 © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org rates and levels of misreporting if we characterized the survey as being about politics. However, only nonresponse biases were larger when the topic of the survey was described as political, and this difference was only marginally significant. These two ways of framing the study had even smaller effects on estimates derived from other items in the questionnaire. The overall biases in estimates derived from the voting items are very substantial, and both nonresponse and measurement error contribute to them.