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Connected and Uncooperative: The Effects of Homogenous and Exclusive Social Networks on Survey Response Rates and Nonresponse Bias

January 2024

Working Paper Number:

CES-24-01

Abstract

Social capital, the strength of people's friendship networks and community ties, has been hypothesized as an important determinant of survey participation. Investigating this hypothesis has been difficult given data constraints. In this paper, we provide insights by investigating how response rates and nonresponse bias in the American Community Survey are correlated with county-level social network data from Facebook. We find that areas of the United States where people have more exclusive and homogenous social networks have higher nonresponse bias and lower response rates. These results provide further evidence that the effects of social capital may not be simply a matter of whether people are socially isolated or not, but also what types of social connections people have and the sociodemographic heterogeneity of their social networks.

Document Tags and Keywords

Keywords Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant keywords.

By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
survey, disclosure, respondent, social, ethnicity, privacy, bias, population, associate, network, community, public

Tags Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at several tasks, including entity tagging.

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:
Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration, University of Chicago, American Community Survey, National Opinion Research Center, W-2, Core Based Statistical Area, Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board

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