Obtaining Responses by Mail or Web: Response Rates and Data Consequences

This purpose of this study was to explore the willingness of the people who have obtained information from Cooperative Extension, a quasi-general public population, to respond to a customer satisfaction survey via the Internet when receiving the request by postal mail. A list of Extension clients was sampled and randomly assigned to three experimental treatments -the traditional mail-only treatment, a mail/Web choice treatment where the client received both a paper version and the url address to the survey, and a Web-preference treatment. For the latter, the client received only the url in the initial request and then a paper survey and the url were provided in the follow up request.