Are Incentive Effects on Response Rates and Nonresponse Bias in Large-scale, Face-to-face Surveys Generalizable to Germany? Evidence from Ten Experiments

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes.You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an OpenContent Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.euThis is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in "Public Opinion Quarterly" following peer review. In survey research, a consensus has grown regarding the effectiveness of incentives encouraging survey participation across different survey modes and target populations. Most of this research has been based on surveys from the US, whereas few studies have provided evidence that these results can be generalized to other contexts. This paper is the first to present comprehensive information concerning the effects of incentives on response rates and nonresponse bias across large-scale surveys in Germany. The context could be viewed as a critical test for incentive effects because Germany's population is among the most survey-critical in the world, with very low response rates. Our results suggest positive incentive effects on response rates and patterns of effects that are similar to those in previous research: The effect increased with the monetary value of the incentive; cash incentives affected response propensity more strongly than lottery tickets do; and prepaid incentives could be more cost-effective than conditional incentives. We found mixed results for the effects of incentives on nonresponse bias. Regarding large-scale panel surveys, we could not unequivocally confirm that incentives increased response rates in later panel waves. 6 Survey researchers have been increasingly concerned with decreasing response rates, a change that has been reported in developed countries over the last several decades (Atrostic et al. 2001; de Leeuw and de Heer 2002;Brick and Williams 2013). Decreasing response rates can lead to biased estimates if the nonresponse is not at random (Rubin 1976). Even when nonresponse is not selective, increasing the sample size as a direct countermeasure incurs higher costs. To increase survey response, several methods have been developed, such as advance letters, special contacting procedure...

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