The Impact of Nonresponse in Different Survey Phases on the Precision of Prevalence Estimates

Objective: Survey research is widely used in social studies. Whereas it has been widely known that nonresponse might produce biased results and impair the precision, the pattern of the impact on the precision of the estimate due to the non-response in the different survey stages is historically overlooked, though such information is essential to guide the recruitment plan. This study proposed to examine and compare the effect of first and second level nonresponse on the precision of prevalence estimates in the multi-stage survey studies. Based on the benchmark dataset from a state level survey, we used simulation approach to create datasets with different first and second level nonresponse rates and then compare the margin of error (an indicator for the precision) for the 12 outcomes between datasets with first vs. second level nonresponse. Results At the same nonresponse rate, the mean margin of error was greater for the data with first level nonresponse, compared to the data with second level nonresponse. As the nonresponse rate increased, the loss of precision was more inflated with the data with first level nonresponse, suggesting that the effort for recruiting primary sampling units is more crucial to improve the estimate precision in survey studies.