Leverage-Saliency Theory

Leverage-saliency theory, as first proposed by Robert M. Groves and his colleagues in 2000, is a unifying theory to help explain survey nonresponse, with the goal of helping to identify strategies to counter nonresponse.

Nonresponse is a critical challenge to survey research. Those who do not respond to surveys (or to parts of questionnaires) may differ in important ways from those who do respond. Leverage-saliency theory attempts to describe the underpinnings of individual behavior related to the individual's choosing to cooperate or not to cooperate with a survey request. The theory posits that different people place a different level of importance to various attributes associated with a survey request. These attributes are like weights on a scale, tipping the scale to the sample person either acceding to or declining a particular survey request. An implication of the theory is that the response propensity of any one person deciding to cooperate or not with a specific survey request will vary across different survey requests and that few people will always agree or never agree to participate when they are sampled for a survey.

This entry describes several key attributes of the survey request and how these interact in terms of their leverage, value disposition, and saliency to affect survey response. The entry includes suggestions as to how interviewers can tailor their requests to make more salient those attributes with the greatest amount of positive leverage for an individual from the sample. This entry describes the leverage-saliency theory in terms of an individual sample person. In theory, the ability to alter the survey request design in ways that make salient those request attributes, to which various subgroups give positive leverage, will aid in increasing response among subgroup sample members as well. However, in practice, this often is hard to achieve at a cost-acceptable level.