The Impact of Informed Consent Regulations On Response Rate and Response Bias

Abstract

This paper reports an analysis of nonparticipation and bias in a survey research project conducted among seniors in 18 high schools under the federal "informed consent" regulations. Three major findings emerge. First, the use of voluntary participation and (among students under 18)parental consent procedures reduced the participation rate sharply from that obtained in a similar survey in 1964. However, the reduced participation did not introduce much bias into three criterion measures for which population data were available: mean intelligence score, mean GPA, and the intelligence-GPA correlation. Third, we found that bias in these measures on a school-by-school basis was not strongly correlated with the participation rate, suggesting that researchers need to consider factors other than the response rate in assessing the amount of bias in survey research on high school populations.