Using incentives to reduce unit nonresponse in surveys is an established practice, with prepaid incentives being particularly effective in increasing participation rates. In this paper, we investigate how incentives affect participation rates and sample composition in an offline-recruited mixed-mode survey (concurrent paper/web and push-to-web), using an experimental design. We conducted a survey on residential satisfaction and reasons for moving place, sampling residents who moved away from two urban neighborhoods in Cologne, Germany, between 2018 and 2022. Addresses were provided by Cologne’s Office for Urban Development and Statistics, including information on the residents’ age and gender. Of a random sample of …

This paper complements earlier work about incentive effects in wave 5 of the Panel Survey of the Swiss Election Study (Selects) about the possibilities to decrease incentives for high estimated response propensity respondents. In the present paper, we study possibilities to decrease incentives in wave 6 for the complementary group, the low-propensity respondents. For high-propensity respondents, continuing an (expensive) conditional CHF 10 (cash) produced only slightly higher response rates and a similar sample composition compared with an (inexpensive) lottery (5 x 300 CHF) in wave 5. For low-propensity respondents, however, switching to the lottery produced an 8% points lower response …

Little is known about the trade-off between response rates and sample selection on the one hand and costs of different incentives on the other hand in mature online panel surveys. In wave 5 of the Panel Survey of the Swiss Election Study (Selects), a conditional CHF 20 (cash) is used for the politically least interested, while the remaining sample is randomized in two incentive groups: a conditional CHF 10 (cash) and a lottery (5×300 CHF). In the two experimental groups, there are only small differences regarding sample composition, and response rates are only slightly higher in the more expensive cash …