A penny for your thoughts - the use of cash incentives in face-to-face surveys

The main body of this dissertation are three experiments on respondent incentives. The incentive experiments have similarities but also cover different aspects of incentive use. All experiments are conducted in the first wave of a longitudinal study with the goal to motivate respondents not only to participate in one survey, but to stay for the long haul. All experiments include at least one condition, offering cash incentives upfront without any strings attached (unconditional cash incentives). The first experiment I present in chapter 5 is comparing unconditional cash incentives to conditional cash incentives in the GIP recruitment survey. I present effects on response rate and sample composition. The added twist to this experiment is that the values of both types of incentive are chosen in a way that their total cost is the same: payinge10 offered conditionally to about half the (responding) sample members compared to e5 sent unconditionally to all sample members. Incentive effects in this experiment are thus measured under the realistic assumption of a fixed survey budged, that needs to be used most effectively on an incentive scheme. The cost aspect is expanded on chapter 6 when discussing the GIP reminder incentive experiment. Here I compare registration rates to the GIP online panel conditional on receiving an unconditional cash incentive with a reminder letter to just receiving the reminder. In addition to reporting on registration rates and sample composition I examine if the use of the cash incentive was cost effective for the GIP project. Finally, I included the results of the SHARE Germany wave 4 incentive experiment form 2011. Parts of the results presented in chapter 7 are taken from a working paper on this topic (Börsch-Supan, Krieger, & Schröder, 2013). However, the results fit nicely into the present volume and the presentation has been improved and the findings are still relevant for todays survey researchers:Testing unconditional cash incentives of high value in a setting of a large, national face-to-face study.