Where Have the Respondents Gone? Perhaps We Ate Them All

Rising rates of nonresponse are one of the most-debated issues in contemporary survey research. While early survey research regularly achieved response rates close to 100 percent, contemporary telephone interviewing methods in the United States regularly obtain response rates below 10 percent, due to a mix of noncontact and refusals. Existing research has examined a number of factors that explain variation in response rates, yet almost all such work considers survey response as an isolated, independent event. This note aims to stimulate debate by suggesting that a paradigm shift in theorizing nonresponse is needed. I diagnose the problem of nonresponse not only as an individual-level, survey-specific phenomenon, but as something larger and more collective: namely, as a common pool resource (CPR) problem. Because researchers acting independently might each seek to maximize their response rate and achieve intended sample sizes, the common pool resource of human respondents can be prone to overextraction. In addition to thinking about “benefit-cost” explanations for why respondents might respond to a specific survey, considering responses as a shared resource focuses attention on cross-level theory on how the survey field might collectively govern responses from human populations. Rather than testing CPR theory directly, I instead describe why thinking of nonresponse as a CPR problem may be useful, use the United States as a case study to demonstrate the possible scale of response extraction, and leverage findings from CPR studies to suggest directions for future research into nonresponse.