Abstract
In conducting surveys, incentivizing participation through the use of cash or other rewards has often been used to encourage participation. This is often done with the hopes of increasing response rates and, therefore, representativeness of the responding sample as well. The effectiveness of incentives has generally been shown to be positive, but results have been mixed for conditional incentives and for online surveys. Using an experimental design and leverage-salience theory, the survey uses a random sample of full-time undergraduate students to estimate group differences. Both official and self-report data are utilized to assess various social statistics. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three different groups, which determined whether they were offered five dollars, two dollars, or nothing for their participation. Results indicate that a five-dollar conditional reward credited to students’ campus ID card account does increase participation rates, which does improve the representativeness of the sample by reducing differences in GPA and gender proportions. The difference in representativeness, however, does not appear to significantly bias substantive conclusions.
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