The Nature of Missing Data

Princeton University’s Rowena Gomila and Chelsey Clark (2022) note that “Attrition is the most pervasive and critical type of missingness in psychology studies” (p. 143). In one common form of attrition, people just skip questions when given the chance (i.e., when they aren’t required to answer every question). In some ways, attrition is the dirty little secret of questionnaire research, though it’s not really all that “little.” You may not be aware of this, but when researchers report the results from their work, it’s rare that they tell you how many holes there were in their data set.