Altruistic donation to improve survey responses: a global randomized trial

Abstract

Objective Web-based platforms have revolutionized the ability for researchers to perform global survey research. Methods to incentivize participation have been singularly focused on European and North American participants with varied results. With an ever increasing proportion of biomedical research being performed in non-western countries, assessment of novel methods to improve global survey response is timely and necessary. To that end, we created a three-arm nested randomized control trial (RCT) within a prospective cohort study to assess the impact of incentives on survey responsiveness in a global audience of biomedical researchers. Results Email invitations were sent to authors and editors involved in online publishing totaling 2426 participants from 111 countries. Overall we observed a 13.0% response rate: 13.3% for the control group, 14.4% for a group entered to win a gift card, and 11.1% for a group whose participation lead to donation to charity (p = 0.17). Year of publication nor country impacted response rate. Within subgroups, editors were significantly less likely to respond to the survey as compared to authors (6.5% vs. 18.9%; p-value < 0.01). With power to detect a 4.8% difference among groups, we could not detect an impact of incentives on global survey response.

Perspectives From Authors and Editors in the Biomedical Disciplines on Predatory Journals: Survey Study

“…Surveys were administered using REDCap, with one reminder sent to nonresponders. We simultaneously performed a nested randomized controlled trial on incentives to encourage survey response, which is published separately [17]. Invitees were randomized into a control group, a group eligible for a cash prize (US $100), and a group whose response lead to monetary donation to charity (US $2.50 to Rotary International per respondent).…”

Payment versus charitable donations to attract agricultural and natural resource survey participation

“…Case study I shows donations work better than payment, but this may again be a function of the experimental context. Conversely, Case study II shows that donations are inferior to payment among online respondents, matching evidence from Hubbard and Little (1988), Warriner et al (1996), and Gattellari and Ward (2001), but equivalent among mail respondents (Cohen et al, 2019;Conn et al, 2019). Case study II may also lend its findings to the idiosyncratic nature of its sample of forest landowners, whose preference for supporting forest-related education (Project Learning Tree) would be comparatively lower versus the traditionally strong connection farmers have to their local FFA chapter.…”

“…Incentives may be cost‐effective by improving early responses, reducing the expense of additional follow‐up activities (Brennan et al, 1993; Larson & Poist, 2004). Incentives can take several forms such as direct payments (Cohen et al, 2019), gifts (e.g., chocolate; Brennan & Charbonneau, 2009), lotteries/prize drawings (Bosnjak & Tuten, 2003), or nonmonetary rewards (Church, 1993).…”

“…Researchers have explored a variety of tactics to improve survey participation, including personalization (Trespalacios & Perkins, 2016), reminders (Van Mol, 2017), and offering incentives (Cohen et al, 2019). Dillman et al (2014) offer a comprehensive review of the techniques improving response rates, including incentives but has no specific advice for agricultural and natural resource surveys.…”

Offering prosocial incentives on‐top: Do they sweeten the deal or poison the well?

“…Regarding prosocial incentives, offering a low amount usually does not significantly affect participation likelihood, and increasing the incentive amount can even significantly decrease participation likelihood. This has been found consistently across settings including survey-(e.g., Cohen et al, 2019;Furse & Stewart, 1982;Gendall & Healey, 2010;Göritz & Neumann, 2016;Warriner et al, 1996) and non-survey tasks, in particular, work-related tasks (Schwartz et al, 2021). People perceive a tradeoff between helping others and investing the same time in an activity that benefits them, which can make them opt out of the task (Berman & Small, 2012;Schwartz et al, 2021).…”