Incentive Impact on Data Quality, Sample Composition, and Respondents’ Topic Interest

This article investigates the impact of offering a small incentive for a web survey of utility customers in the Mid-Atlantic United States. We explore background demographics and characteristics, response patterns, and data quality. Offering a small incentive was found to increase response rates. We did not find convincing evidence that offering an incentive affects data quality. However, we did find some evidence that the lack (or presence) of an incentive may impact sample composition and failing to provide an incentive may lead to more responses from people who are more interested in the survey topic.