The Silent Minority by John Goyder

Author:John Goyder [Goyder, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367295776
Google: LJxxygEACAAJ
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Goodreads: 52907968
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

6

Response Behaviour and Involvement with Topic

This chapter examines the impact of topic on probability of response. Some of the richest investigations of nonresponse result from studies dealing with samples selected from the membership of organizations. Membership lists often include telephone numbers, allowing easy electronic follow-ups for nonrespondents on mailed questionnaires, and the resulting intensive fieldwork generates data amenable to comparison of early versus late returns. In addition, many kinds of organization maintain files sufficiently detailed to permit extensive record-linking studies of nonresponse.

Such studies reveal that those central to an organization will be highly responsive on virtually any survey dealing with organization-related topics. Thus, in a survey of 'The League of Woman Voters', Donald (1960: 109) encountered the greatest resistance among those who 'could be classified as zero or marginal participators'. Alumni with 'a feeling of loyalty to the institution' proved the most responsive to Reuss's (1943: 435) questionnaire mailed to alumni of a state college, and 'those to whom the organization is a significant reference group' were thought the most cooperative by Larson and Catton (1959: 244). Length of service predicted response among retired YMCA secretaries surveyed by Britton and Britton (1951: 59), and Rosenthal and Rosnow (1975: 113) discovered nearly a dozen studies, mainly surveys, where strong 'organizational bonds' entailed high cooperation rates.

In hierarchial organizations, the familiar status theme reappears, in combination with involvement. Those near the apex of an organization will often be most central (Etzioni, 1961: 16). Hence, Zimmer's (1956) finding that in a mailed survey sent to US Air Force personnel, high rank increased probability of return, The effect holds for civilian occupational bureaucracies too, as seen in Ford and Zeisel's (1949: 496-7) work on 'a certain class of a company's employees . . . who quit their jobs,' in Gannon et al. (1971), studying checkout clerks in a supermarket, in Kirchner and Mousley (1963), surveying salesmen, and in Britton and Britton's (1951: 59) data on retired school teachers. In the civilian studies, status often is measured by employee performance among personnel holding equal formal rank within the organization,1

Sometimes, it seems to be not simply loyalty to an organization, but a more direct self-interest, which promotes response on a survey. Several of the well-known studies on nonresponse on mailed surveys involved late 1940s research on World-War-Two veterans. Researchers such as Baur (1947) and Clausen and Ford (1947) established that response depended on how closely the topic of the survey matched the veterans' own concerns. Former servicemen planning school or training, for example, gave a particularly high response to a survey on educational plans (Clausen and Ford, 1947: 507). A similar effect was suggested by Bergsten et al. (1984: 652), discussing the probability that 'nonenrollees' in a US government medicalcare programme 'would have less involvement in the subject matter of the survey' than would enrollees (also Kasper, 1979: 76). The hunting-permit purchasers, discussed in chapter 5, can only in the loosest sense be termed members of an organization. (Elusive though it may be to find the watertight

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