Are we being surveyed to death?

In just the past few weeks, I’ve received online requests to fill out surveys from my bank, my newspaper, an airline I flew with, a hotel I stayed at, Best Buy, the DC regulatory agency, several graduate students, and my dentist’s office. I’ve been going to the same dentist for almost 15 years – an indicator which suggests I’m quite satisfied with her care. So why am I asked to fill out a survey after every single visit?

Because designing and implementing surveys is one of the things I do for a living, I tend to sympathize with whoever prepares these online surveys and is hoping for a high response rate. However…

Providers of goods and services want customer feedback for marketing purposes and, presumably, for improving their performance. I understand that. Yet, because it is so easy now to conduct surveys via the internet, we are getting bombarded with them. Surveys are just too easy to create and disseminate. All these companies and researchers are asking us to give them our precious time without, however, offering anything in return. Well, for a while, a hotel chain I frequently used would at least offer 250 award points for every customer survey I completed after a stay, but they eventually stopped with that incentive and I, quite rationally, stopped responding. The deal was off. In fact, I’ve mostly stopped responding to any surveys at all, at least of the online variety.

Indeed, people in general are responding less and less willingly to surveys; over the last several decades, there has been a steady decline in survey in response rates. This is apparent in annual or quarterly surveys which seek to elicit information on incomes, expenditures, and assets – the type used by the government and researchers to gauge changes in national wellbeing, or inequality. To take one typical case, whereas in 1990 just 12 percent of survey people did not respond to the US Census Bureau’s Consumer Expenditure Diary, in 2009 the share had risen to 29.7 percent, as reported by Roger Tourangeau and Thomas J. Plewes. In their 2013 book, Nonresponse in Social Science Surveys: A Research Agenda they note that survey nonresponse is a growing issue not just in the US, but in all wealthy countries. Of course, this is also the period over which we’ve seen the rapid rise of internet access. Is it a coincidence? Maybe not.

One can easily imagine how survey, or interview, fatigue has become an issue. Survey fatigue generally refers to the phenomenon of a respondent tiring before she has answered all the questions. (Remedies include reducing the number of questions, and making them more interesting and relevant. Tourangeau and Thomas J. Plewes also cite studies showing that female interviewers get higher response rates to surveys, but we’ll save an analysis of the gender angle for another time. ) However, another type of survey fatigue, which I can personally attest to, comes from being surveyed just too darn often.

Because they are so cheap and ubiquitous, survey proliferation could be creating problems for researchers attempting to get a better sense of the attitudes, or merely trying to track economic and social trends over time. If non-responses are more common among very high income households inequality may be underestimated, a point that Nobel-prize winning economist Angus Deaton  has highlighted. It’s hard to say for sure. We would need to do a survey, to ask folks if they’re tired of being surveyed! While the meta-nature of such an endeavor appeals to my sense of irony, it might be tempting fate.

In the meantime, if you’re as tired as I am of clicking on those ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘don’t know’ boxes, try to be more selective. Think about who’s asking you for information, and who’s going to benefit. Is it a firm, which has already squeezed your wallet a bit and now wants to squeeze your brain as well? Or is it some other sort of research which, potentially, is somehow targeting the greater good?

Edited July 10, 2019