서베이앤헬스폴리시리서치센터

SHPRC Research Short Notes (RSN)

First Published: August 2024 | Revised: September 2024, June 2026

The Survey & Health Policy Research Center’s Research Short Notes (RSN) provide valuable methodological insights for conducting surveys and writing research papers.

Introducing the Total Representativeness Rate: A Complementary Metric to Response Rates

Sunwoong Kim

Introduction

For more than two decades, the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) response rates (RR1–RR6)—defined as the number of complete interviews divided by the number of eligible units in a sample—have been widely used among researchers to monitor surveys during data collection or to report survey quality as a proxy for nonresponse bias (see AAPOR, 2023). Under the deterministic view that respondents and nonrespondents are fixed in the population, the formula for nonresponse bias can be expressed as the product of the proportion of nonrespondents relative to the population size and the statistical difference between respondents and nonrespondents (see Groves et al., 2009, p. 189). The factor term “proportion of nonrespondents” in this formula has motivated researchers to strive for higher AAPOR response rates to mitigate nonresponse bias.

However, AAPOR response rates suffer from three critical weaknesses. Firstly, response rates alone cannot predict the nonresponse bias of individual survey estimates. Secondly,