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Web Survey Bibliography

Title The Influence of Respondent Incentives on Item Nonresponse and Measurement Error in a Web Survey
Year 2013
Access date 31.05.2013
Abstract

Even though a sampled person may agree to participate in a survey, she may not provide answers to all of the questions asked or might not answer questions correctly. This may lead to seriously biased estimates. It is well known that incentives can effectively be used to decrease unit nonresponse. The question we are analyzing here is whether incentives are able to decrease item nonresponse and measurement error as well. To study the effect of incentives on item nonresponse and measurement error, an experiment was conducted with participants of a Web survey. In addition to an incentive for participation, an extra prepaid incentive ranging from 0.50 Euro to 4.50 Euro was given to some respondents towards the end of the questionnaire in the form of an Amazon-voucher. At the same time, respondents were requested to think hard about the answers to the next questions and be as precise as possible. In this experiment there are two reference groups: one group received the request but no incentive and the other did not receive any request or incentive. The questions within the incentive experiment contain knowledge questions, recall questions referring to different time periods, and questions about subjective expectations. We approach our research questions in three steps: Our first analysis focuses on the effect of incentives on the proportion of “don’t know”s and “no answer”s. In a second step, we look at the amount of rounding and heaping as an indicator for measurement error. In the third step, we examine measurement error directly for two variables (income, unemployment benefit recipiency) by linking the survey data to German administrative records and computing the difference between survey response and administrative records. Comparisons across the different incentive groups will allow for an assessment of the effectiveness of incentives on item nonresponse and measurement error.

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Conference Homepage (abstract)

Year of publication2013
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
Print

Web survey bibliography - The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) 68th Annual Conference, 2013 (88)

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