Please share from your own experience when did you find the response rate being higher among participants. How much effect does offering money and gifts has on participant behavior?
Question has three perspectives.
Do people participate more when monetary benefits are given or is it just neutral and does not matter much whether anything is offered or not?
Do they become more casual in responding (assessed through infrequency and lie scales) when benefits are offered, as they look for finishing the task and getting their name entered in the list for benefits?
What effect does providing results on questionnaires have in this case? Do they respond more honestly when we tell them about sending results afterwards, as they want themselves to be assessed properly in this case?
I would like to know if any research about this has been done As a fresh researcher I want to know how to increase the input from participants.
Any help would be appreciated.
Yes, incentives/cash rewards/gifts have a positive effect on the number of participants and you can easily notice this if you are planning to do so.
Remember, you aren't paying people to do the study, you are compensating them for their time/inconvenience. So, if you think about it that way, then not surprisingly the following factors (certainly in our experience) affect response rates. The more a given factor is present, the more the incentive should be raised to compensate participants fairly for their time. That in our experience is correlated with response rates:
1. Target audience normal compensation rates (e.g.,, executives will expect/require higher compensation than most college students). Offering participants more than what they might reasonably be expected to be compensated is likely to be perceived as coercive (by IRBs, so you want to avoid that). So, for typical sample in a poor area in Africa you might want to check on the typical hour rates to be sure that your compensation fits your sample and isn't too large (coercive) or too small (inadequate compensation for time).
2. Time required for the study (obviously, for longer studies compensation has to be in line with time spent).
3. Difficulty (and perhaps how boring or otherwise problematic/intrusive the task is -- for example, more interesting/fun tasks may be perceived as less of a burden and be associated with lower compensation rates).
4. Costs/time associated with getting to and from the study.
5. Expectations for future compensation in the study (e.g., in a longitudinal study). Initial compensation can be low (we used a lottery recently on the initial recruitment and that worked well when participants knew they would subsequently receive larger amounts for a later part of the study.
6. Extra personal monetary compensations (e.g., will help cause believe in; know researchers/group that they are from and want to help them, etc.) that are strongly motivating participants.
In our experience it pays to pilot your incentive structure to insure that you are compensating people fairly (while not being coercive), especially if you have additional retention issues (in a longitudinal study). Sometimes, of course, you simply do not have enough funds to compensate participants as you would like, you may discover that you should therefore keep the study as short as possible (or as interesting as possible without adversely impacting your internal validity) to boost your response rate.
Don't forget that today some researchers use "community" incentives by offering to give a specified amount of $$ for every completed questionnaire to a charity. This has proven to also be quite effective in increasing responce rates.
Rewards, in cash or kind do motivate people to spend their productive time for responding to questionnaires. If you take out the incentive, the participation level drops dramatically. Yes, if the questionnaire is really compelling and people can relate to it, then they will be inclined to respond even without any material gains. In general, the participation level is directly proportional to perceived incentives. Higher the incentive, higher the participation and vice versa.
Human psyche is very complex. In any organization, a person gets driven by various aspects that fulfill his/her physiological, psychological and intellectual needs. Hence motivation through rewards in cash or kind may fulfill the partial needs and may not extract the desired responses. As the person moves up the organization ladder, he/she requires the necessary recognition as expert professional for fulfillment of self actualization needs. Entrepreneurial managers do get driven by 'achievement motivation' . While reward, monetary or non monetary, is essential, but it is not the be all and end all. Every human being possesses creative potential which remains explored or unexplored depending on psychological & intellectual development, as well as the surrounding environment in the formative years of life. Therefore , participant's response rate is likely to depend on the level of motivational needs.
I have a paper got rejected just because i mentioned that I offered two prizes (2 out of 1200 participants !!) when i was collecting my data. The reviewer mentioned that it is unethical to include such a thing. Well, my reaction was like "its unethical for a respected journal like i one i sent my manuscript to, is to have such a reviewer".
Its totally acceptable among researcher, and most importantly its ETHICAL !!
You should check this article:
Buhrmester, M., Kwang, T., & Gosling, S. Amazon's Mechanical Turk: A New Source of Inexpensive, Yet High-Quality Data? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 3 - 5.
They found that when recruiting participants through MTurk payment level did not influence overall participation or the quality of data but it did influence the speed of data collection.
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