Web Survey Bibliography

Title Survey content foreknowledge and response rate
Year 2003
Access date 07.05.2004
Abstract Web-survey response are typically much lower than comparable mail or telephone surveys. However, web surveys offer many advantages in increasing data quality. This paper will report on an effort to increase response rates in web surveys by offering a preview of the survey content to initial non-responders to an invitation.
In the course of managing a previous survey of University of Michigan faculty, I received comments from invitees to the effect that they were not interested in taking a survey that they could not preview. The present effort involves a survey conducted for a hunters’ group, the United States Sportsmen’s Alliance, of elected officials, media opinionmakers, wildlife professionals, outdoor writers and sportsmen’s group leaders. Over 8,000 invitations were sent out via email [in addition, all Governors, US Representatives and Senators received an invitation via US mail.] All non-respondents received an email reminder.
Half of the non-responders were randomly assigned to the experimental group who received a standard reminder; the other half received a reminder that contained an overview of the topics to be covered in the questionnaire.
At the time of writing this abstract, the questionnaire has been fielded but I have received no data.
The experimental hypothesis is that those non-respondents who received the overview will respond in greater numbers than those who received only the standard reminder. In addition, we plan to contact up to 300 non-respondents from the Wildlife Professional group to both ascertain their reason for non-response and to administer the survey via telephone.
Access/Direct link Homepage - conference (abstract)
Year of publication2003
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
Print

Web Survey Bibliography - The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) 58th Annual Conference, 2003 (45)