John Goyder - The Silent Minority

Nonrespondents on Sample Surveys

John Goyder

First published 1987 by Westview Press

Published 2019 by Routledge
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Copyright in London, England by John Goyder 1987

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LC 87-51163

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-29577-6 (hbk)

My wife never answers surveys. My sister-in-law, of similar age and social class, usually does. The discrepancy puzzled me, because response on surveys is thought to be predictable from social background. When I told my wife she should be an enthusiastic survey-responder, she was unimpressed. The words 'I just don't like surveys' rang through the house. I resolved to fathom the mystery, and soon found myself writing this book on survey-response behaviour.

Another motive for entering into such matters derives from an interest in comparing response rates for surveys collected in Canada and in the United States. The more I contemplated this question, and the issue of how to separate the behaviour of surveyors and their 'subjects', the more consciousness of the multiple causes of response behaviour grew.

The project evolved over nine years, with funding from several sources. I benefited initially from an SSHRC (then the Canada Council) Leave Fellowship held in 1978. The University of Waterloo, administering an SSHRC small grants programme, supported me in 1982 and again in 1984, Another Leave Fellowship, for 1985-6, provided timely assistance in seeing the project through to completion. The survey reported in was possible due to funding by the Dean of Arts and by the Teaching Resource Office at the University of Waterloo.

I am indebted to the following for help: Norleen Heyzer, Kerry Davies, Jean Leiper and Olorunfe Taylor-Cole assisted in compiling the macro data for the study. Content analysis of newspapers was performed primarily by Jean Leiper, with assistance from Gabriella Landa-Holmes, David Tymofie and Joti Sekhon. On the record linking I was helped by Joti Sekhon, Christine Hutchinson, Ella Haley and Joan Lyons. Twenty-one methodology students collected the 1982 survey on surveys. Patricia Anderson, Helen Chapman and Joan Lyons conducted telephone interviews for the 1985 replication of the 1982 survey. Marnie Goyder was coder on the replication, and Claude and Eleanor Goyder clipped newspaper stories about surveys. Krista MacKenzie was a fine interviewer on the Arts-Faculty survey. I recall with gratitude Cathie Marsh and Michel Audet, for reviewing chapters, and Gerry Rose who carefully read and criticized the whole manuscript. For a term in 1978, and a year in 1985-6, I benefited from the hospitality of the Social and Political Sciences Committee, Cambridge University. Staff at the University of Waterloo Arts Computing Office patiently advised me about computer problems. Finally, I have very much enjoyed working with Tony Giddens and others at Polity Press.

Some of the material presented here has appeared earlier in article form in journals. The core arguments from appeared as an article in the Spring 1986 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly. I am grateful to the journal editors for permitting me to draw from the above publications.

A passage in is quoted from the August 1978 issue of American Sociological Review, with the kind permission of the editor.

The literature on survey response is enormous, and there was little point in attempting an inclusive bibliography. amounts to a quantitative review of much research on maximizing response on surveys, and freed me from having to cite hundreds of individual studies. The survey methodology studies explicitly referenced are representative, I hope, and identify within their own bibliographies many further works on survey-response behaviour.

What the experiment is to psychology, the sample survey is to the rest of social science. Some may lament that statement, joining writers such as Becker and Geer (1957) in extolling the participantobservation tradition, but the reality of the survey's ascent to dominance remains incontestable. 'Sample surveys have become the major mode of empirical research in a wide variety of social-science disciplines and their associated applied fields,' says the Handbook of Survey Research (Rossi et al., 1983: xv).

Although origins are traceable back to antiquity, most histories identify surveying squarely with the industrial age. It was in the three early industrial powers, England, Germany and the United States, that the main developments in the method occurred. Data gathering in Germany, often involving subjective questions, accelerated under Bismarck, and Karl Marx himself attempted using a questionnaire. A British approach to surveying developed particularly distinctively with Booth's and with Rowntree's studies of urban poverty. Parallel evolution was occurring in the United States, fertilized in addition as newspapers began late in the nineteenth century to experiment with 'straw polls' of elections. With Bowley's pioneering in early twentieth-century Britain of careful attention to random sampling, the age of the modern survey was at hand. And, with the expansion during the inter-war years in the United States of interest in attitude questions, supplementing what had been the more British practice of concentrating on census-like inquiries, the survey had arrived as a flexible method for gathering many sorts of social-science data, equally useful for academics, government statisticians, and commercial pollsters. How the survey became fully institutionalized into American society and later in Britain, Germany, Canada and elsewhere, is told in histories such as Mitchell (1968: 126-43), Jahoda et al. (1971: 99-125), Teer and Spence (1973:9-23), Gordon (1973), Easthope (1974), Cullen (1975), Elkins and Blake (1975), Bdard (1978), Rossi et al. (1983: 2-9), Converse (1984), Kent (1985) and Marsh (1982: 9-36; 1985a).

The survey began to attract scholarly attention. Critics such as Blumer (1948) and Riesman and Glazer (1948) considered the individualistic presuppositions and implications of the method. Carroll (1972) identified 'paradigm'-like features of surveys, while Marsh (1982) answered the charge that surveys are innately positivist. Ogmundson (1977: 811) has written of the 'trained incapacity' of survey researchers to depart from liberal-democracy interpretations, and Oakley (1981) maintained that the survey interview derives from 'a masculine paradigm'. Galtung (1967: 148-59) addressed several of the above themes together with the notion that the 'survey method is restricted to a middle range of social position'.

Simultaneously, a rich technical literature on surveying entertained topics such as 'the art of asking questions' (Payne, 1951; Sudman and Bradburn, 1982), 'questions and answers' (Schuman and Presser, 1981), 'interviewing in social research' (Hyman, 1954), 'survey sampling' (Kish, 1965), 'response effects in surveys' (Sudman and Bradburn, 1974), and a 'total design' (Diilman, 1978) for surveys. The ethos within that methodological literature has remained operational, establishing how the practical day-to-day work of surveying can most effectively be conducted.