Trust, Concerns and Attitudes: Examples for Respondent (Non-)Cooperation in SHARE

Item non-response, particularly regarding income questions as well as respondents' reluctance to consent to record linkage are common issues in survey methodololgy. Both aspects have a potentially severe impact on data quality leading to less precise or biased estimates and thus might hamper substantive analyses. While the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) tries to alleviate these problems, e.g. through income imputations, it seems especially important to understand the underlying issues that keep respondents from reporting their income or consenting to record linkage. We thus used the opportunity to include an additional paper-and-pencil drop-off questionnaire with the German sub-study in Wave 8, focusing on issues like trust in surveys and organizations, data privacy concerns as well as attitudes towards income questions. Largely in line with previous research, we found a tendency that positive attitudes towards surveys have a positive association with providing consent and an income response, while concerns about data confidentiality with regard to surveys are negatively associated with consent and income response. Moreover, providing a substantive (exact) answer to the income question is positively correlated with consent, while there is nearly no difference between refusing a substantive income answer or providing only a (rough) estimate of one's household income. In both cases it can be assumed that respondents do not want to freely provide their income, which is negatively associated with linkage consent. This gives further insights into the underlying reasons why consent to data linkage as well as a substantive income response is given or not by people aged 50 years and older in Europe.