I'm planning to send email to respondents to partake in my survey, but I'm not sure to whom I should send emails. To all my target population or just to the sample size
Nonresponse rates in email surveys are often quite high, so mailing only to your projected sample size will almost certainly not be adequate.
A good source on how to maximize the effective of email surveys is: Dillman et al., Internet, Mail, and Mixed-Mode Surveys: The Tailored Design Method.
Dear Isaias,
i always send for all possible respondents. therefore, there are always cases of non-response. Or draw two or three times the minimum sample, so if there is no answer I can include another respondent in the "hole" of the sequence.
If you send for the for just the projected size of interview. You, with big probability, will have a small number of answers that you need, due to non-responses.
Hope this help
Best Regards
Dirceu
As per my personal experience, response rate to emails is very low. I had to remind them again and again. So I definitely would suggest to contact maximum people so that you can have high response rate.
First, decide on the number of responses you need to get the desired standard errors, next decide on the response rate you expect (probably low, as others have noted), and then divide the number of desired responses by the response rate. If this is entirely an email survey, then there is really no cost to contacting everyone, but if you have ways of following up that do require resources, it would be better to devote your resources to getting a high response rate than to getting a large number of responses. If there is a systematic bias associated with nonresponse, then expanding your sample size doesn't eliminate that bias, while increasing the response rate does help to reduce the bias. Also, consider weighting to adjust for nonresponse.
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