A startling report from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press this week reveals 9 out of 10 Americans don't participate in polling. (Emphasis mine)
It has become increasingly difficult to contact potential respondents and to persuade them to participate. The percentage of households in a sample that are successfully interviewed – the response rate – has fallen dramatically. At Pew Research, the response rate of a typical telephone survey was 36% in 1997 and is just 9% today.
Looking at the data, when ten people are called for a survey, four will be unreachable by phone, five will refuse to participate, and one will take the survey.
This doesn't make the polling necessarily inaccurate. It does, however, mean a lot of people aren't offering up their opinions to the media in which they've lost lost trust.
Some other highlights:
- Republicans and registered Democrats have equal propensities to respond to surveys.
- The most affluent households and the least affluent have a similar propensity to respond.
- As has long been true, one of the largest differences between standard survey samples and the full population is on educational attainment – 39% of respondents in the standard survey say they graduated from college. That compares with 28% of adults in the Current Population Survey.
