Organizational Surveys: Using Response Enhancing Techniques and Conducting Nonresponse Analyses

Abstract

Surveys provide a critical source of data for scholars, yet declining response rates are threatening the quality of the data being collected. This threat is particularly acute among organizational studies that use key informants—the mean response rate for published studies is 34 percent. This article describes several response enhancing techniques and explains how they were implemented in a national study of organizations that achieved a 94 percent response rate. Data from this study are used to examine the relationship between survey response patterns and nonresponse bias by conducting nonresponse analyses for several important individual and organizational characteristics. After identifying the variables most susceptible to nonresponse bias, a final analysis estimates the minimum response rate needed to ensure that those variables will not contain significant nonresponse bias. This study has implications for survey researchers, scholars who analyze survey data, and those who review their research.