An Experimental Study on the Impact of Contact Design on Web Survey Participation

Abstract

In higher education institutions, web surveys are frequently used for educational, research, and administrative purposes. One of the consequences of this is increasing oversurveying of higher education students, leading to low response rates. This naturally has important implications for the validity of web survey results. Consequently, we set up a methodological experiment at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, whereby the total student population was invited to participate in a web survey in order to investigate which features of contact design can positively influence web survey participation. We particularly focus on subject line content, the communication of deadlines and their timing, as well as the delays between contact moments. The results reveal that students were more likely to respond to a web survey invitation when the subject line is written in the national language in multilingual contexts. Furthermore, although the findings did not indicate an advantage of using a deadline, they also suggested that if a deadline is to be used, a longer deadline might be more beneficial.

Integrationists, Critical Europeanists and Pessimist Europeanists: EU attitudes among students in a German university

“…This corresponds to a response rate of 6.21 per cent of the entire student population enrolled at the University of Göttingen at the time of the survey (N: 28,174). Such a response rate is not unusual for online surveys among students (see for instance Maineri & van Mol, 2021). In order to enhance the response rate, we raffled 50 Amazon vouchers each worth 20 euros.…”