Contingent versus unconditional incentives in www-studies

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Internet;Družboslovno raziskovanje;

Data

Language:	English
Year of publishing:	2005
Typology:	1.01 - Original Scientific Article
Organization:	UL FDV - Faculty of Social Sciences
Publisher:	Fakulteta za družbene vede
UDC:	303
COBISS:	24321629
ISSN:	1854-0023
Views:	236
Downloads:	50
Average score:	0 (0 votes)
Metadata:

Other data

Secondary language:	Unknown
URN:	URN:NBN:SI
Type (COBISS):	Not categorized
Pages:	str. 1-14
Volume:	ǂVol. ǂ2
Issue:	ǂno. ǂ1
Chronology:	2005
Keywords (UDC):	social sciences;družbene vede;methods of the social sciences;metode družbenih ved;
ID:	1467975