Abstract

this article we attempt to provide an approach to quantifying the costs and benefits of incentives, as a means of assisting in the decision of whether and how to apply an incentive in a particular telephone survey. We proceed in two steps. In Section 2 we reanalyze the data from the comprehensive metaanalysis of Singer, Van Hoewyk, Gebler, Raghunathan, and McGonagle (1999) of incentives in face-to-face and telephone surveys and model the effect of incentives on response rates as a function of timing and amount of incentive and descriptors of the survey. In Section 3 we apply the model estimates to the cost structure of the New York City Social Indicators Survey, a biennial study with a nonresponse rate in the 50% range. In Section 4 we consider how these ideas can be applied generally and discuss limitations of our approach

Citations