June 13, 2008

Response Rates in Surveys

To the Editor:

In Sara Lipka's "In Tight Employment Market, Career Services Gain Clout" (The Chronicle, May 16), one authority asserts that a survey of recent college graduates must achieve a response rate of over 90 percent to be credible. Another source is satisfied with a 70 percent response rate.

In fact, there is no magic target for an acceptable response rate. Such generalizations assume too much about the relationship between response rates and measurement validity, and

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