Impact of Different and Reduced Incentive Amounts on Longitudinal Survey Response Rates and Overall Cost

• Activity Number: 185
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, July 30, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Yan Wang*+
• Companies: American Institutes for Research
• Keywords: cash incentives ; response rates ; telephone follow-up cost ; longitudinal surveys ; reduced incentive ; average cost per respondent

Abstract

The Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study is an annual survey of a national sample of public school teachers about their job conditions, mobility and attrition. In order to boost response rates, study participants were given cash incentives in waves 3 and 4 before the survey was administrated. In wave 3, all cases were randomly assigned to two incentive groups ($10 vs. $20). The results showed that a larger incentive amount was associated a higher response rate. However, the cost analysis taking consideration of telephone follow-up cost showed that $20 group also had higher average cost per respondent. In wave 4, all cases were given $10 because of budget concerns and relatively low cost of follow-up effort in wave 3. The results showed that, for the people who received the same incentives in both waves, there was no significant change with their final response rates from wave 3 to wave 4. However, the response rate of people who received the reduced incentive in wave 4 was significantly lower than their response rate in wave 3. The average cost per respondent also increased as a result of having extended telephone follow-up period and dedicated staff to boost the response rate.