Abstract
Researchers have increasingly adopted a web survey for data collection. Previous studies have examined factors leading to a web survey’s success. However, virtually no empirical work has examined the effects of the three levels of forced responses or the two styles of question items displayed on a web survey’s response rate. The current study attempted to fill this void. Using a quasi-experiment approach, we obtained 778 unique responses to six comparable web questionnaires of identical content. The analysis confirmed that (1) there were statistically significant differences across the surveys with the 100%-, 50%- and 0%-forced responses, and (2) there is not a significant difference between the response rates between surveys with scrolling and those with paging styles. In addition to extending the theoretical insight into factors contributing to a web survey’s response rate, the findings have offered recommendations to enhance the response rate in a web survey project.
Highlights
Online questionnaires are tools that social science researchers including those in business and management fields have adopted to gather data from samples through major web browsers (Lee & Yun, 2015)
If the project’s target population taps those whose profiles are not largely shared with Internet user profiles, researchers may have to give up the online version
To conform to the approach of using an experiment in social science research, we selected the condition of the scrolling style with no forced-response as the control group
Summary
Online questionnaires are tools that social science researchers including those in business and management fields have adopted to gather data from samples through major web browsers (Lee & Yun, 2015). Given the nature of the Internet, the samples’ responses may be different from those taking part in traditional paper-based questionnaires. Such responses include those from the same subject or from. In addition to the IP check, Lee and Yun (2015) used samples recruited by a marketing research company who guaranteed the qualification of the samples Compared to their offline counterpart, online questionnaires still offer three major advantages. The current study is an attempt to use an experiment to see if any of the design or the process factors can help enhance the response rate of a web survey
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