What is the minimum acceptable completion rate for a qualitative web based survey that is emailed (via a link to the survey with an invitation letter) to academic staff in charge of learning and teaching in the same discipline in all universities in the same country? The survey has 6 open ended questions and is estimated to take 15 -20 minutes to complete. Participants have two weeks to complete the survey.
G'day Silvia McCormack
as it is the case with most qualitative research, there is no abstract, finite number of respondends. It all depends on your research question(s) and study design. The same holds true for quantitative research, by the way. More need not always be better, especially when your sample is not representative of anything.
Typically, you would stop adding more people to your sample if the chance of discovering new aspects relating to your research question(s) grows smaller and smaller. Lastly, "completion rate" can either refer to item-nonresponse (not answering some of the six questions) or unit-nonresponse (not answering any of the questions).
Hope that helps at least in some way.
Best
Marcel
Hi Silvia,
When collecting data for my doctoral thesis I sent a survey to colleagues at 42 universities. My target was to receive replies from at least half the universities (21). In fact, I received 27 replies from 16 universities, because there were 26 HEIs that didn't reply (despite polite reminders), but at other universities more than one person responded. I was able to compare my response rate with a published paper in a similar research area, which reported on survey results from 21 universities (i.e. 21 responses), so that the volume of responses I achieved looked broadly comparable. So, I suggest that you might be able to follow a similar strategy. If you can identify published research by researcher X, and the amount of data / response rate achieved by researcher X was Y, then as long as your response rate / amount of data looks similar or better, your research will probably look face valid. You can even explicitly draw comparison between your data collection and the data collection of researcher X in the text of your paper or thesis.
Thank you Brian and Marcel for your feedback. I am a little more positive now about how to use the information collected to achieve some outcomes.
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