Working with Low Survey Response Rates: The Efficacy of Weighting Adjustments

Abstract

National data show a continuing decline in the willingness of people to respond to surveys. This trend is troubling given the central role that survey research plays in collecting data for institutional research purposes. This paper examines the effectiveness of a weighting procedure described by Astin and Molm for adjusting survey results to correct for nonresponse bias. Using data from a Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) follow-up survey, the results indicate that the weighting procedure is highly effective at reducing nonresponse bias in univariate distributions. The effectiveness of the weighting procedure in adjusting correlation and regression analyses is less clear. This may be due in part to the observation that even when individual variables are noticeably biased, their relationships with each other tend not to be.