Talk:Response rate

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What is a high response rate?

  Depends somewhat on the context, but for survey data to be reliable you should be aiming at 50% or more of the target population to be confident that your statistics are correct.

Surveys rely on a random sample of the target population and if the response rate is too low then the sample is probably not random.
For instance in a telephone survey of the US and you normally get 45% response rate (45% of people called complete the survey questions) but you run a poll in the middle of the superbowl or 2am in the morning and the response rate drops to 10%, then the sample is skewed - thos e 10% who complete are different from the other 90% of the telephone owning population in some way. GrantB 02:38, 16 February 2007 (UTC)