The Perils of Survey Fatigue

Declining response rates threaten the quality of US economic statistics

- Cristina Lindblad

Surveys. They’re everywhere: at the end of every customer service call, on the bottom of your drugstore receipt, and sometimes even on your way out of the airport restroom.

No harm will likely come from you declining to rate your dining experience or refusing to take part in an opinion poll. Where survey fatigue may pose a real threat is in government statistics that everyone from policymakers at the Federal Reserve to traders on Wall Street to C-suite executives rely on.

The pandemic has accelerated what’s been a yearslong decline in response rates for many of the surveys US government agencies use to compile economic data—a worrying development in an age when markets can swing wildly on a jobs number that’s just a few thousand figures higher or lower than expected.

Current and former officials say lower rates of participation don’t necessarily mean less accurate data, but there is potential for error to creep in if the trend can’t be arrested.

“If this continues forever, if you just stretch these lines out, we’re going to be getting to a place where it’s hard to think that there won’t be some biases,” says Erica Groshen, a former commissioner of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. “I think any data user has to be always asking themselves, ‘How good are these data I’m basing these decisions on?’ ”