What Money Can Buy: Examining the effects of prepaid monetary incentives on survey response rates among college students

Abstract

This study examined the effects of prepaid monetary incentives on college students' rate of responding to a survey designed to assess beliefs and values. It also assessed the extent to which incentive effectiveness depended on such student characteristics as gender, race, and socioeconomic status. The findings suggest that $2 incentives enhance response rates over $0, but that $5 incentives do not substantially improve response rates over $2 incentives. Further, although the descriptive findings suggested that the effectiveness of incentives varied across different groups of students, multivariate analyses identified no such differences.

Notes

The CSBV survey was developed as part of a multiyear national study of undergraduate students' values and beliefs that is funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The study's Co-Principal Investigators are Alexander W. Astin and Helen S. Astin. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation. The authors thank Helen S. Astin and Alexander W. Astin for their roles in conceptualizing the larger project, as well as Linda J. Sax and the anoymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

“University” is defined as an institution of higher education conferring a certain minimal number of earned doctoral degrees. If an institution with a postbaccalaureate program does not offer the minimal number of earned doctoral degrees, it is considered a 4-year college.

One institution with an extremely low response rate was dropped from the sample, bringing the total number of institutions to 46.

Although the items in the factor scales did not directly parallel those used by Astin (1993) due to differences in item availability, the majority of the items we used corresponded to those in Astin's original factor scales.