Now what are the consequences of
asking sensitive questions in your questionnaire.
There are three consequences that you might
want to be aware of when constructing a new survey.
The first one is, if you include a sensitive
question and the respondents do know about it
ahead of time, you might have a higher
unit nonresponse rate than you would have otherwise.
People are less likely to participate in a survey with sensitive questions.
If they do participate and you hit that segment, you will have item nonresponse.
People will, if asked, not tell you that information that they consider sensitive.
And a good example, again, is the income question.
Across many surveys there's about a quarter of the respondents,
who do not reveal the answer to that particular question.