Refusal Conversion Incentives and Participation in a Longitudinal Study of Older Adults

In an effort to prevent non-response, survey practitioners are increasingly offering refusal conversion incentives to reluctant respondents (Singer 2002). However, despite the potential for preventing attrition, these types of differential incentives are generally avoided in longitudinal studies. Of particular concern to survey practitioners in deciding to offer additional incentives is the possibility respondents will come to expect higher incentives in future waves of the study (Laurie and Lynn 2009). If this is the case, the introduction of refusal conversion incentives to a panel study could lead to greater reliance on such incentives in future waves (Singer 2002; Steeh et al. 1999), resulting in escalating respondent incentive costs over time. There is relatively limited knowledge of the long-term effects of tailoring incentive strategies to respondent behavior (Laurie and Lynn 2009). In what appears to be the only existing investigation of refusal conversion incentives in a panel study, Lengacher and colleagues (1995) examined the influence that refusal conversion incentives had on respondents ’ future participation. They found that, among respondents needing refusal conversion, those receiving additional incentives and those receiving non-monetary conversion approaches had nearly indistinguishable participation rates in a later wave. This paper expands on this research by exploring the effect of refusal conversion incentives on both participation and incentive costs in multiple waves of a panel study. We conducted our analysis in the context of the Nationa