Factors Causing Non-Responce in Various Types of Questions in Social Research

Non-response is a problem for the quality of measurement in general, because with a large number of non-response, the size of the considered sample is noticeably reduced, which leads to a narrowing of the focus of the study. Because of this, the interpretation of the data may not get all the possible characteristics of the characteristic and there may be a bias in the results. Also, this problem leads to a limitation of the types of analysis. Many researchers (for example, N. A. Klyushina, Francis J. D. Busch L. and others) conducted research in order to identify factors that increase the likelihood of a non-response in a question. But despite the various directions in the search for the causes of non-responses, in foreign and Russian sociology the causality of non-responses by various factors has been studied quite one-sidedly - there are very few studies that would analyze this problem into its components, depending on the types of questions and their topics, and identify what features of the questions and characteristics of respondents contribute to unanswered questions. Based on the analysis of data from the 2018 ESS survey in Russia, it was revealed how the psychological characteristics of respondents influence non-responses to questions of various types in sociological research. In addition, it was determined which combinations of psychological characteristics of the respondents (which portrait of the respondent) will give the greatest share of non-responses.