Abstract
Response to survey questionnaires is vital for social and behavioural research, and most analyses assume full and accurate response by participants. However, nonresponse is common and impedes proper interpretation and generalizability of results. We examined item nonresponse behaviour across 109 questionnaire items in the UK Biobank (N = 360,628). Phenotypic factor scores for two participant-selected nonresponse answers, ‘Prefer not to answer’ (PNA) and ‘I don’t know’ (IDK), each predicted participant nonresponse in follow-up surveys (incremental pseudo-R 2 = 0.056), even when controlling for education and self-reported health (incremental pseudo-R 2 = 0.046). After performing genome-wide association studies of our factors, PNA and IDK were highly genetically correlated with one another (r g = 0.73 (s.e. = 0.03)) and with education (r g,PNA = −0.51 (s.e. = 0.03); r g,IDK = −0.38 (s.e. = 0.02)), health (r g,PNA = 0.51 (s.e. = 0.03); r g,IDK = 0.49 (s.e. = 0.02)) and income (r g,PNA = –0.57 (s.e. = 0.04); r g,IDK = −0.46 (s.e. = 0.02)), with additional unique genetic associations observed for both PNA and IDK (P < 5 × 10−8). We discuss how these associations may bias studies of traits correlated with item nonresponse and demonstrate how this bias may substantially affect genome-wide association studies. While the UK Biobank data are deidentified, we further protected participant privacy by avoiding exploring non-response behaviour to single questions, assuring that no information can be used to associate results with any particular respondents.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1371-1387 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Nature Human Behaviour |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| Early online date | 29 Jun 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Aug 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:R.W.’s work is supported by AnalytiXIN, which is primarily funded through the Lilly Endowment, IU Health and Eli Lilly and Company. B.M.N.’s work is supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF21SA0072102). R.K.W. is supported by the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research and R01 MH101244. This research was conducted by using the UK Biobank Resource under application 31063. A.G. was supported by the Academy of Finland (grant no. 323116) and by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant no. 945733). This project also received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 101016775. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) is supported by grant P01 HD031921 to Kathleen Mullan Harris from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Add Health GWAS data were funded by NICHD grants to Harris (R01 HD073342) and to Harris, Boardman and McQueen (R01 HD060726). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. We especially acknowledge and thank the participants in these studies for providing biological data and for their responses and nonresponses to survey questions that made this study possible.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s).