Monetary Incentives versus Promised Contribution to Charity: New Evidence on Mail Survey Response

Abstract

The relative efficacy of two types of incentives for producing responses to a mail survey was investigated. Personal cash payments of varying amounts enclosed with the questionnaire were compared with promises of a contribution to a charity of the respondent's choice and with a no-incentive control. Contrary to a previous research finding reported in the literature, the charity incentive did not produce a significantly greater return rate than was obtained with the no-incentive control. Personal cash incentives produced a significantly greater response rate than either the no-incentive control condition or the charity-incentive condition. Results of the study are interpreted as consistent with a cognitive dissonance theory of mail questionnaire response.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 99 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.