An Empirical Investigation of the Role of the Email Contact in Web Survey Response Rates

• Activity Number: 422
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Hsien-Yuan Hsu*+ and Yi-Hua Lai and Hsin-Ying Chin
• Companies: National Taiwan Normal University and National Taiwan Normal University and National Taiwan Normal University
• Keywords: response rate ; survey instruction ; web surveys

Abstract

Few studies conducted have examined the impact of the e-mail contact that informs the respondents about a web-based survey. One exception is Porter and Whitcomb's study that explored the impact of altering the e-mail contact to understand the effects of personalization, sponsorship, and scarcity on web-based survey response rates. Inspired by their work, our study was aimed to investigate the effect of e-mail contact. In our experiment, 620 college students were invited to participate in a web survey and randomly assigned into three groups. Participants in Group A received an e-mail contact with the statement: "the survey takes about 5~10 minutes to complete", while Group B and C received e-mails contact with different statements (10~15 minutes for Group B; 15~20 minutes for Group C). After we controlled for participants' characteristics and intention to participate in the Web surveys measured before the experiment, the logistic regression results indicated Group B and C decreased by 38.6% and 54.1% respectively to complete the survey than Group A. Our paper concluded that the email instructions, specifically survey completion time, can influence response rate of a web survey.