By the mid-20th century, researchers had settled on probability sampling as the preferred technique for accumulating representative survey samples. This not only provided a scientific approach to ensuring representativeness in survey sampling, but also made possible the application of significance testing to the results obtained. Sixty-plus years later, today's survey research is plagued by low response rates - a serious, worsening, intractable, and exceedingly well documented phenomenon which has been a salient feature of the survey methods literature since the emergence of polling in the 1930s, and a regular feature of statistical and social science journals since the 1940s. 1 Nonresponse - the inability to complete interviews with all qualified members of a sample - is of material importance because it adversely affects our ability to draw representative samples. More to the point: nonresponse diminishes survey research by robbing it of its claim to science. This is because: if we can not trust the samples we draw to be "representative," then survey research can not really be trusted to be science.