ASSESSING THE POTENTIAL OF PARADATA AND OTHER AUXILIARY DATA FOR NONRESPONSE ADJUSTMENTS

Abstract Given the theoretical promise of these auxiliary data for over-coming the challenge of nonresponse, survey researchers have shown an increased interest in collecting paradata, data from screening interviews, and other contextual information. However, very few studies have sys-tematically assessed the use of these data for post-survey nonresponse adjustments. Those studies that do exist generally do not identify aux-iliary variables that correlate with response propensity and key survey variables, a necessary condition for auxiliary data to be effective tools for reducing nonresponse bias. Using the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), this paper leverages a large set of auxiliary variables available for the full NSFG sample to assess their potential as independent tools for post-survey nonresponse adjustments. We begin by using this auxiliary information to predict response propensity (RP) for each person in the full sample. We then display descriptive estimates for a variety of attitudes and behaviors measured in the NSFG, using post-stratification weight