Contingent versus unconditional incentives in www-studies

Göritz, Anja S. (author)

Five experiments examined how participation in WWW-studies was influenced by framing the reception of an incentive as contingent on the completeness of the submitted questionnaire. Four experiments were carried out in a university-based online panel and one in a market research online panel. Four times the incentive was a prize draw and once it was a personal gift. In each experiment, two conditions were contrasted: one group received an e-mail invitation mentioning that all participants are eligible for the incentive (= unconditional incentive), whereas the other group was told that only those participants who answer every question in the questionnaire would receive the incentive (= contingent incentive). Dependent measures were response rate, retention rate, number of omitted closed-ended items, length of answers to open-ended questions, and stereotypical answering of grid-like question batteries. There were no significant effects. The results of the individual experiments were then meta-analytically aggregated. It was revealed that contingent relative to unconditional incentives decrease response to a study, while at the same time the sparser data are not compensated for by a superior data quality or retention.

• Language: English
• Work type: Not categorized
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FDV - Faculty of Social Sciences
• Year: 2005
• Number of pages: Str. 1-14
• Numbering: Vol. 2, no. 1
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-22458
• UDC: 303
• ISSN on article: 1854-0023
• COBISS.SI-ID: 24321629
• Publication date in RUL: 11.07.2014

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Advances in methodology and statistics
• Shortened title: Metodol. zv.
• Publisher: Fakulteta za družbene vede
• ISSN: 1854-0023
• COBISS.SI-ID: 215795712