Problem of Response Rates in Surveys on the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14515/monitoring.2024.4.2549Keywords:
Special Military Operation, Russian-Ukrainian conflict, telephone surveys, response rates, cooperation of respondents, sensitive questions, sample biasAbstract
Today, Russian sociologists encounter the issue of the possibility of conducting surveys in military conditions and in the context of certain domestic political events. Experts and sociologists suggest distortions in the survey data obtained in such conditions due to systematic sample biases and insincerity of respondents' answers. The article analyzes changes in the response rates after the start of a military conflict. The research methods include an analysis of paradata of telephone surveys conducted by the Social Research Foundation from February 26, 2022, to July 7, 2023 and an analysis of public telephone surveys conducted by Russian research companies on political topics containing questions about attitudes towards military actions.
The obtained estimates showed that the number of refusals to participate in surveys on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict during military actions increased, and the cooperation of respondents decreased. However, this did not happen immediately after the start of the military confrontation, but only in the period after the end of the active mobilization campaign (since October 2022). On the one hand, questions about military actions cause more interruptions of interviews than other blocks of questions in questionnaires on military and political topics. On the other hand, the share of interrupted interviews did not increase during the military confrontation. The age and gender composition of samples in surveys on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict shifts slightly from young men to women. However, this shift is weakly expressed and cannot significantly affect the results of the studies. In addition, the changes in the sample structure are compensatory in nature: if earlier samples in political surveys steadily shifted towards men, then during the conflict the samples gradually approach the population structure by gender observed in the Rosstat data (the predominance of men remains but becomes slightly less pronounced). A slight reduction in the share of young people in the surveys is not enough to significantly affect their results. Apparently, it is associated with a shar increase in level of emigration, in which mainly young people left Russia.
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