International Journal of Public Opinion Research Advance Access originally published online on September 23, 2005
International Journal of Public Opinion Research 2006 18(3):364-373; doi:10.1093/ijpor/edh106
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International Journal of Public Opinion Research Vol. 18 No. 3 © The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The World Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved.
Incentive Effects on Response Rates, Data Quality, and Survey Administration Costs
Mario F. Teisl is an Associate Professor in the Department of Resource Economics and Policy at the University of Maine. He received his MS degree in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of Maine and a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland. Before his arrival at the University of Maine, Mario worked as a Staff Fellow at the US Food and Drug Administration in Washington, DC.
Brian Roe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at Ohio State University. He received a bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland. Prior to his tenure at Ohio State, Brian worked as a Staff Fellow at the US Food and Drug Administration in Washington, DC.
Michael E. Vayda is the Associate Dean for Administration, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, University of Vermont. Vayda received a BS in Biochemistry and a BA in Zoology at the University of New Hampshire, an MS in Biochemical Sciences and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology at Princeton University, and did post-doctoral work in plant molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to his move to Vermont, Mike was a Professor of Molecular Biology and Assistant Director of the Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station for Biotechnology at the University of Maine.
Address correspondence to Mario F. Teisl, 5782 Winslow Hall, University of Maine, Orono, Maine 04469, USA, e-mail: teisl@maine.edu
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It is increasingly difficult for survey researchers to obtain sufficiently high response rates to ensure data validity. A common method of increasing survey response is through the use of incentives; previous research has indicated the varying success of a variety of methods and levels of monetary incentives. However, there is less research on the success of non-monetary incentives. A common result is that non-monetary incentives increase response rates but they are generally less successful than monetary incentives. A less commonly studied phenomenon is whether incentives can induce biases in data by inadvertently drawing individuals from select population subgroups into the respondent pool or by influencing respondents’ item response behavior (Singer & Kulka, 2002).
Recently, phone cards have been used as an incentive to increase survey response rates. As noted by Arzheimer and Klein (1999) phone cards ‘cross the threshold between nonmonetary and monetary incentives’ in that they have
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LITERATURE |
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DATA |
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DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS |
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SURVEY NON-RESPONSE
DATA QUALITY
COSTS EFFECTIVENESS
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CONCLUSIONS |
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