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%, contemporary telephone interviewing methods in the United States regularly obtain response rates below 10% 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 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 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. ∗Government Department, London School of Economics and Political Science, thosjleeper@gmail.com

中文翻译：

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受访者都去哪儿了？也许我们把它们都吃了

不答复率上升是当代调查研究中最具争议的问题之一。虽然早期的调查研究经常达到接近 100% 的回应率，但由于非接触和拒绝的混合，美国当代的电话采访方法经常获得低于 10% 的回应率。现有研究已经检查了许多解释响应率变化的因素，但几乎所有此类工作都将调查响应视为孤立的独立事件。本说明旨在通过提出需要在理论化无反应方面进行范式转变来激发辩论。我不仅将不答复问题诊断为个人层面的、特定于调查的现象，而且还作为更大、更集体的事情：即作为公共资源问题。因为独立行动的研究人员可能每个人都寻求最大化他们的响应率并实现预期的样本量，所以人类受访者的公共资源可能容易​​过度提取。除了考虑为什么受访者可能会对特定调查做出回应的“收益成本”解释之外，将回应视为共享资源的重点关注跨层次理论，即调查领域如何共同管理人群的回应。我没有直接测试 CPR 理论，而是描述为什么将无响应视为 CPR 问题可能有用，以美国作为案例研究来证明响应提取的可能规模，并利用 CPR 研究的结果来建议未来的方向对无反应的研究。∗政府部门，