Explanation of Any Payment or Gift to Respondents revised

Explanation of Any Payment or Gift to Respondents
For the telephone sample, letters sent to households before the initial screening interview
will include a $2 incentive. Refusal conversion letters sent to households from the RDD
sample selected for refusal conversion will include a $2 incentive. This differs from the
plan initially submitted to OMB in March 2007 in that the refusal conversion incentive
has been reduced from $5 to $2. The study conducted for HINTS 2003 found that using
an identical plan (i.e., $2 at pre-note and $2 at refusal conversion) does increase the
response rate. Both incentives were found to have independent effects (Rizzo, et al.,
2004).
For the mail sample, the pilot and main field study will include an experiment on the
impact of an incentive included in the first mailing of the questionnaires. Households
selected to receive the mail questionnaires will be randomized to receive in the initial
mailing of the questionnaire with either no incentive or a $2 household incentive. The
goal of this experiment is to determine whether a small incentive can affect mail survey
response. The intent is for the incentive to increase the number of people who read the
letter and distribute the survey to all eligible members of the household. This differs from
the plan initially submitted to OMB in March 2007 in that the mail incentive experiment
has been employed in the first, rather then the second, mailing of the questionnaire.
While it is the case that substantial evidence exists on the effectiveness of incentives for
mail surveys, there is no evidence of how it works in the present context. The research
question that the experiment would test is whether the incentive improves rate of return
from all members of the household, even those that did not open the package.

Rizzo, L., Park, I., Hesse, B., & Willis, G. (2004, May). Effect of incentives on survey
response and survey quality: A designed experiment within the HINTS I RDD Sample.
Paper presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Public
Opinion Research, Phoenix, AZ.