Ethnic bias and design factors impact response rates of online travel surveys

ABSTRACT

Low response rates are pointed as a critical problem in online travel surveys. Tourism researchers need to strive to find ways to increase response rates in order to improve the surveys’ coverage as well as representativeness. Through an experiment, this paper specifically examines the design factors that provide social clues in online survey, and the timing of the solicitation. The results indicated that solicitations sent with a researcher’s Western name induced dramatically more responses (>60%) than did the same solicitation sent with a Chinese name; the attachment of an authoritative title for the Chinese researcher did not mitigate the problem; surveys sent out on Saturday with a reminder on Monday generated the highest response rate; among the variations tested, wording of the solicitation email’s subject line had insignificant impact on response rates. Details of the experiment and an explanation of results based upon underlying social factors are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Design factors
• ethnic bias
• travel surveys
• response rate
• context clues

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our participating Convention and Visitors Bureau for providing the research opportunity. Thanks to Melinda Patience at the College of Charleston for supporting survey distribution and conducting part of literature review.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.