Constellation of views

I'm spending time look at patterns in the nonresponse to a large survey we recently completed. I'm looking at the problem from a number of different angles. It is really very useful to be going over the details and looking at the problem from a number of angles. This is reinforcing a couple of things that I've been saying:

1. We need multi-faceted views of the problem to replace reliance on a key statistic (i.e. the response rate).
2. We need to make a leap beyond the data with reasonable assumptions.

Given the uncertainty about the nonresponse bias, multi-faceted views can't give us much more than a better sense of the risks. With reasonable assumptions, we should be OK.

We will be repeating this survey, so this information may help with future waves. We can use it to guide interventions into the data collection strategy. We might even think of this as quasi-experimental validation of our hypotheses about the nonresponse to prior waves.

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