Incentive Effects on Response Rates, Data Quality, and Survey Administration Costs

It is increasingly difficult for survey researchers to obtain sufficiently high response rates to ensure data validity. A common method of increasing survey response is through the use of incentives; previous research has indicated the varying success of a variety of methods and levels of monetary incentives. However, there is less research on the success of non-monetary incentives. A common result is that non-monetary incentives increase response rates but they are generally less successful than monetary incentives. A less commonly studied phenomenon is whether incentives can induce biases in data by inadvertently drawing individuals from select population subgroups into the respondent pool or by influencing respondents’ item response behavior (Singer & Kulka, 2002). Recently, phone cards have been used as an incentive to increase survey response rates. As noted by Arzheimer and Klein (1999) phone cards ‘cross the threshold between nonmonetary and monetary incentives’ in that they have a monetary value though they do not exchange for the equivalent amount of cash. Thus, phone cards have the potential of increasing survey response rates similar to that of a monetary incentive. A potential benefit to using phone cards is that, bought in bulk, the researcher can provide a quasi-monetary incentive that makes individuals respond equivalently to a similarly-valued monetary incentive but at a significantly lower cost to the researcher. For example, if a five-dollar phone card may be purchased for 2. 50, and individuals respond to a phone card in a similar way to an equivalent monetary incentive, then the cost of the survey is substantially reduced. This has implications in terms of survey costs and data quality.