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Pete Cape
Survey Sampling International
Member
August 25, 2009 / Read/Post Comments
Anyone else think we should settle on a term for payments to participants? Personally I don't believe this small payments are incentive to do anything (and not much of a reward... but there you go). If they were incentives surely we'd see a positive correlation between levels of payment and response rates.
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Comments
Its always funny to me when I see actual surveys that use the word incentives in the text for respondents. It strikes me as so strange. How about we settle on 10 minute surveys and avoid the issue altogether? We could call these payments "Our attempt to get you to take this survey right now because our report is due to the customer tomorrow and if you don't take the survey now I'll never land another job in this industry again so thanks a million but that's really 282 points in your happy panel member bank account" Is that too long a name?
Hahaha Jessica, too true, that sometimes the q'aire that went through several revisions, for which you finessed and cut and tightened and reviewed in an hour+ long conference call with three people in two time zones...was sped through by a panelist who was also chatting online and cooking dinner. We sometimes call our incentives "honoraria" and sometimes "a token of our thanks", which more puts it in its place. A thank-you is good also, along with good food at in-person qual sessions and as good a user experience as possible, always.
The discussion of social exchange theory applied to surveys in Dillman, Smyth, and Christian (2009), Chapter 2, might be of interest here. See also Figure 7.2 in that book, which provides data on the effect of differing forms and levels of payment.