The Effects of “Preprinting” on Survey and Item Response Rates: A Research Note

Abstract

Introduction To be eligible for federal grant programs for the construction and maintenance of outdoor recreation facilities, the Land and Water Conservation Act of 1965 requires states to prepare a comprehensive outdoor recreation plan every five years. Current regulations for the State Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Planning (SCORP) process call for evaluation of the demand for, and supply of, outdoor recreation resources and facilities in the (National Park Service, 1991). These plans provide a basis for recommending allocations of federal and state funds to local jurisdictions for the construction and operation of recreation facilities as well as the acquisition of land. In preparing SCORPs, states have used several different approaches to address the concept of need or demand for facilities (Vance, 1986). One is to ask the public what is needed or what demand is currently unmet. The public, however, may not be able to identify unmet recreation facility needs and some groups with greatest need may not be heard. Outdoor recreation facilities are generally unpriced, or at least not priced in such a way that supply will respond to demand, so traditional supply and demand concepts cannot be usefully applied. Estimation of demand for specific recreation facilities based on travel cost surrogates is not practical at the required level of detail for the entire state. Given the difficulty of estimating the supply of and demand for recreation facilities using complex statistical methods, Hoffman and Westfall (1984) developed an to guide the allocation of funds on the basis of differences among service areas in existing supply per capita. In such an approach, differences in the supply of recreation facilities per capita are used to guide the allocation of recreation facility funds. This service-area based, equity approach tends to provide equality of recreation opportunities, rather than a response to current levels of participation or expressions of unmet demand. It is equity oriented rather than efficiency oriented. It also avoids the intractable problem of estimating recreation demand. If estimates of facilities per capita by type take into account income differences and geographic differences, at least some of the possible misinterpretations from using norms of supply per capita can be avoided. In addition, fund allocations guided by SCORP plans typically respond to requests from local government units that must provide 50% matching funds. If there is no locally perceived demand for a particular facility, then the locality is unlikely to provide matching funds. The state can decline funds if the locality already has a supply per capita that is above the norm for that particular facility type. Such allocative decisions, however, require not simply a list of sites, but detailed information about the facilities available at those sites. If funding proposals request lighting for softball fields, for example, then decision makers need information about the relative supply of lighted softball fields within that service area. The Hoffman and Westfall to recreation facility management, therefore, requires two sets of data: general data on local populations and detailed information on the existing supply of recreation facilities. States have used a variety of techniques to estimate facility supplies. These include phone interviews, mail surveys, and delegating the task to local governments (Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, 1989; Washington Interagency Committee for Outdoor Recreation, 1990; Indiana Department of Natural Resources, 1990). The most common approach, however, is the mail survey. Mail surveys are well known for their low cost and low response rates. As a result there has been much research on how to increase response rates without increasing costs. For at least thirty years researchers have tried numerous techniques to increase response rates to mail surveys. …