Condemned to be meaningful: Non-response in studies of men and infertility

Male infertility has been under-researched, and in part this seems due to a strong reticence by men to talk to researchers about infertility. Rather than suggest possible features of male infertility that might lead to this reticence, this paper explores how researchers have themselves accounted for the high nonresponse rates. The analysis details the way in which social scientific reasoning about non-response incorporates both existing knowledge about infertility and everyday reasoning about health and illness. It is suggested that this process is a variant of a pervasive form of commonsense reasoning the documentary method of interpretation. The interesting upshot of applying this method to non-response, is that an absence of information is 'condemned to be meaningful'.