Refusal Report Form (RRF)

A large proportion of nonresponse in surveys is due to refusals, which occur when a request to participate in a survey is declined. Researchers are concerned about the effect of refusals because of the potential error that they can introduce in survey estimates.

A refusal report form (RRF) is a structured form used by interviewers immediately after a refusal is encountered. The employment of an RRF process produces valuable paradata and has three main benefits:

• 1.
  It can provide estimates of relevant parameters (e.g. refuser gender, race, age) that can be compared with the obtained sample to help determine the presence and impact of potential nonresponse bias.
• 2.
  It can provide valuable information that can help interviewers in subsequent contact attempts to convert these refusals into completed interviews.
• 3.
  It can help researchers conduct investigations into the nature of refusals so as to plan better strategies on how to reduce their frequency of occurrence.

RRFs capture structured information about all individual refusals that most often is lost when interviewers are given only informal instructions to write down notes about the refusals if they think it is appropriate.

RRFs are used in mediated interviews—that is, those that are conducted by interviewers, either in person or on the phone. Information about the refusal is recorded based on estimates that interviewers make either visually (for in-person) or audibly (for telephone and in-person).

There is no standardized format for an RRF. (Paul J. Lavrakas appears to have been the first to describe the use and value of such a form and to show an example of it in a book on telephone survey methods.) Researchers develop RRFs with variables that are most relevant to the study and that are reasonable to be estimated by interviewers given the situation. For example, in an in-person survey, an interviewer may be able to provide information about the type of home, neighborhood setting, and so forth. Telephone interviewers could not begin to estimate those details from brief phone conversation but past research has shown that they can provide accurate estimates of certain demographic characteristics for the person being spoken to.

In any case, the RRF usually tries to capture two types of information, linked to the two benefits specified previously. Demographic information about the refuser (e.g. gender, age, race) and details about the context of the refusal (e.g. strength of the refusal, reasons given for refusal, perceived barriers to participating, etc.) may help interviewers, in future attempts, to convert that refuser into a cooperating respondent.

Given that the vast majority of refusals in telephone surveys typically occur in the first few seconds of the interviewer-respondent interaction, the interviewer has very little time to develop rapport, anticipate potential barriers, and alleviate respondent objections. Although there has been little published about the use of RRFs, research by Sandra L. Bauman, Daniel M. Merkle, and Paul J. Lavrakas suggests that telephone interviewers can accurately make estimates of gender, race, and age in a majority of cases, even when the interactions are brief. These estimates can be used to help determine the presence of nonresponse bias.

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