Prospective respondent integrity behavior in replying to direct mail questionnaires: a contributor in overestimating nonresponse rates

The research questions of this study were to what extent are deliverable mail questionnaires addressed to the wrong prospective respondent returned unopened to the researcher vs. completed by someone other than the persons they were mailed to? Thus, the purpose was to investigate the existence of a prospective respondent integrity behavior factor among people who received incorrectly named, yet deliverable, questionnaires and the impact of this behavior on estimating nonresponse rates, nonresponse bias, and administrative sampling error as well as on the generalizability of results to the original defined target population. Since only approximately 41% of such questionnaires are returned to the researcher, reported response rates of mail surveys will be incorrect if this particular integrity behavior factor is not considered. Since only 0.5% of such questionnaires are completed and returned, incorrect deliverable questionnaires are not a significant contributor in limiting the researcher's ability to assess response type errors.