ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

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Response rates have fallen persistently across modes, populations, and national contexts for decades. Despite sustained research into innovations for contact strategies, incentive structures, adaptive designs, and multi-mode approaches, no intervention has succeeded in reversing the decline at scale. At best, we can argue that rates would be worse without these efforts, providing a sobering result for decades of methodological investigation.

This session invites critical examination of why nonresponse continues to increase (or has been resistant to large-scale improvement) and why organizational and methodological interventions have proven insufficient to arrest it. We propose that understanding this requires moving beyond traditional (often singular) explanations toward a more structural diagnosis or theory. Four interlocking forces appear to be at work. First, broad societal shifts in communication norms, including greater control over contact (telephone use), information overload (over-surveying), and changing expectations around unsolicited contact, have fundamentally altered the interviewer-based survey environment. Second, fiscal pressures have pushed data collection toward lower-cost (self-administered) modes that, by design or consequence, produce lower response. Third, eroding public trust in institutions, governments, and data-collecting organizations has made willingness to participate less automatic and more contingent. Fourth, and perhaps most consequentially, growing organizational tolerance of lower response, supported by confidence in statistical adjustments, may have reduced the motivation to solve the underlying problem.

Each of these explanations deserves scrutiny and individually may be insufficient. Where are we headed if we continue to accept lower response and in turn declining efficiency of sample frames? Are we failing to identify the right methodological innovations, and are existing theories sufficient for guiding research?

This session welcomes empirical and theoretical contributions that challenge prevailing assumptions about nonresponse, test causal mechanisms, and advance the field’s understanding of why response has been so difficult to obtain and sustain.