Declining survey response rates concern researchers aiming to ensure study validity. This article tested the effectiveness of multiple pre-incentives on increasing survey response to the Millennium Cohort Study. Participants consisted of U.S. military service members and veterans, and were randomly assigned to receive a $2 bill, $5 gift card,…

Mailing campaigns are a way to keep longitudinal survey respondents engaged. While mailings usually include a survey answer request, sometimes respondents are contacted between-waves to update contact information or simply to keep respondent contact. Research on the actual impact of these between-wave contacts on response rates is scarce. This…

We tested a novel extension to mailed invitations to a web-push survey, using a postcard invitation to deliver a scratch-off giftcode incentive similar to an instant-win lottery ticket. Scratch-off postcards were included as one of five conditions in randomized survey experiment varying two mailing types (letter and postcard) and three incentive…

Even small monetary incentives, e.g., a one-dollar bill in a postal invitation letter, can increase the response rate in a web survey. However, in the euro currency area, the smallest amount of monetary incentive for a postal invitation is a five-euro bill, which is costly. As such, we conducted a random experiment with prepaid stamp and postcard…

Responsive survey design is a technique aimed at improving the efficiency or quality of surveys by using incoming data from the field to make design changes. The technique was pioneered on large national surveys, but the tools can also be applied on the smaller-scale surveys most commonly used by sociologists. We demonstrate responsive survey…

Several times each year the teaching performance of academics at higher education institutions are evaluated through anonymous, online student evaluation of teaching (SET) surveys. Universities use SETs to inform decisions about staff promotion and tenure, but low student participation levels make the surveys impractical for this use. This scoping…

Previous research has shown that increasing the size of incentives can increase response rates for probability-based, cross-sectional surveys. However, the effects of incentives on web panels have not been extensively studied. We sought to answer the question: What is the effect of larger, postpaid incentives on (1) response, (2) data quality, and…

A decline in response rates was found for agricultural education research studies using survey research methods. The use of incentives and various response modes can affect survey response rates and were the focus of this experiment. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of survey response mode and incentives on response rates…

Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) can provide valuable assessment information. However, online administration of SETs has corresponded with lower SET completion rates. We examined perceptions of strategies for increasing SET completion rates and the effect of offering psychological prompts (completion goals, reminders, progress feedback) and…

Internet surveys of American Evaluation Association (AEA) members are a common method for studying evaluation practice. Response rates obtained from Internet surveys of AEA members are, however, frequently very small. To investigate whether or not material incentives increase response rates to Internet surveys of AEA members, a between-subjects…

The $2 bill is commonly used as a prepaid incentive in survey administration. Despite the widespread use of this incentive, there is no peer-reviewed research into how providing a single $2 bill rather than two $1 bills affects survey response rate. The results are from a mail survey of 2,970 rural landowners in Michigan with identical survey…

Over the past few decades, the survey industry has experienced a steady decline in response rates, which has posed numerous challenges for researchers, most notably concerns about nonresponse bias. We present results from three studies conducted in an attempt to increase response rates and reduce nonresponse bias for a U.S. national household…

"Apprentice and Trainee Outcomes 2021" provides a summary of the outcomes of apprentices and trainees who completed an apprenticeship or traineeship during 2020, with the data collected in mid-2021. The figures are derived from apprentices' and trainees' responses to the National Student Outcomes Survey (SOS), which is an annual survey…

Cumulative evidence is mixed regarding the effect of lottery incentives on survey participation; little is known about why this strategy sometimes works and other times fails. We examined two factors that can influence the effectiveness of lottery incentives as suggested by leverage-salience theory: emphasis of survey attributes in invitations and…

This paper examines longitudinal survey response as a product of an alternative incentive structure that mixes guaranteed and non-guaranteed incentives. Specifically, we considered the impact of winning an initial non-guaranteed survey incentive on students' response to future surveys (both with and without guaranteed incentives). We found that…