Using incentives to motivate college students to participate in web-administered survey research

Getting college students to participate in survey research can be challenging, which is borne out by low and declining response rates. Understanding what drives student participation can improve representation, helping to ensure that campus surveys reflect the realities of the full student body. Researchers continually try to identify effective strategies to motivate students to complete questionnaires. For web surveys, a promising approach is to offer incentives for participation, like gift cards or prize drawings. In this article, Dykema et al. examined how subtle differences in incentive strategies impact if and how completely college students respond to a survey. The authors used data from a study that was fielded to collect information from college students at 33 institutions of higher education about sexual misconduct and assault on their campuses. That study, available from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) and sponsored by the Association of American Universities (AAU) is called the Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct, 2014-2019 (ICPSR 37662). The survey was made up of 12 sections of questions, covering subjects like sexual harassment and sexual assault, prevention training, reporting behavior, and bystander behavior. Schools participating in the AAU survey were encouraged to include incentives in order to increase response rates. Dykema et al. specifically analyzed data from an experiment embedded in the climate survey, which randomly assigned a subset of respondents to different incentive conditions, allowing the researchers to make causal claims about incentive effects. They evaluated whether prize drawings were more effective at increasing survey participation when the payout is a smaller number of higher-valued awards (four $500 cash prizes), versus a larger number of lower-valued awards (20 $100 cash prizes). They also compared the effects of such prize drawing payouts to the effects of a small, guaranteed incentive ($5 Amazon gift cards). Dykema et al. determined the effectiveness of each type of incentive based on participation rates, as well as the quality of the survey outcomes, measured by item nonresponse, and other indicators.

Their findings showed that although all of the incentives increased participation over no reward, guaranteed gift cards motivated the highest response rates, and fewer respondents left before answering all the questions. But although high-payout prize drawings may sacrifice some data quality, they may be more budget-friendly when surveying many students. According to the authors, “Building on the current research is essential to understanding the effects of the many dimensions of incentives, specifically promised incentives and prize draws, on response rates, data quality, and costs.”