Effect of a monetary incentive on chiropractors’ response rate and time to respond to a mail survey

Electronic mail was not better than postal mail for surveying residents and faculty

“…Traditional paper-based surveys serve as an important research tool in health care and methodological issues related to surveys are therefore of interest to clinical epidemiologists [1][2][3][4][5]. Compared to postal or other survey methods, electronic surveys (e-surveys) are inexpensive and researchers can pilot test e-surveys rapidly [6].…”

Combining conditional and unconditional recruitment incentives could facilitate telephone tracing in surveys of postpartum women

“…These include characteristics of subjects (postpartum women), survey method used (CATI), efforts spent on tracing and recruitment of subjects (field operations), in addition to qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the incentives provided (check and telephone card). Often, the survey method is predetermined by the target population of interest, especially when subjects are health professionals [6,[12][13][14][15]17,19,23]. In other situations, a choice of different survey methods, including telephone [2][3][4]8], mailed [16,20], or direct interview [1] surveys or a combination of these [5,10] could be applied.…”

“…Recent studies have emphasized trends of decreasing tracing and contact rates in face-to-face interviews [1], telephone and computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] as well as mail [10,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] and internet [25] surveys. Survey recruitment has become so problematic that a Summit, sponsored by the U.S. Census Bureau, was held in 2002.…”

“…Most surveys to date have been conducted among subjects from the general population [1][2][3][4][7][8][9][10]18,[20][21][22], while others have targeted low-income people [16], students [25], older women [24], and health professionals [6,[12][13][14][15]17,19,23]. Few studies have addressed telephone tracing and contact rates among women of reproductive age or tested the effectiveness of using different incentives to promote recruitment in CATI surveys [27].…”

“…Previous research has assessed monetary [1,6,10,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18]20,21,[23][24][25] and nonmonetary [13,[16][17][18]20,21,24,25] incentives or inducements. Some studies have compared a monetary incentive to no incentive [15,19]. Others have evaluated quantitatively different monetary incentives [6,12,16,20,23].…”