A Meta-Analysis of Experiments on the Effectiveness of Incentives in Organizational Surveys

Abstract

The use of monetary and non-monetary incentives for increasing response is considered a proven and widely used method in surveys of individuals or households. This applies not only to mail, but also to face-to-face and telephone surveys. Experimental research shows that the technique is also effectively used in non-official surveys of organizational populations, not only to increase unit response rates but also to improve response completeness, response quality and speed and even attitude towards the survey sponsor, without negative influence on bias. Nevertheless the use of incentives is typically not applied in official business surveys. We report the meta-analysis of 34 experimental studies that implemented a monetary or non-monetary incentive in order to increase response rates in an establishment survey. The included studies comprise a variety of survey methods, sample frames, survey topics, research organizations, population types, industries, respondent types, countries, data types, and both voluntary and mandatory surveys. We report the mean effect size of the use of incentives and the mediating effects of the study features based on the meta-analytic method of inverse variance weighted regression using random effects maximum likelihood estimation.