Effects on Survey Responses of Subjects, Incentives, and Multiple Mailings

Abstract

This inquiry was conducted to examine potential influences on perceptions of survey subjects regarding characteristics of the subjects, incentives to enhance mail returns, and multiple requests for information. A mail survey sent to 297 former students produced responses from 48.3% of the sample. Analyses of returns yielded the following results: (a) Sampling former students across level of teaching experience and year of graduation did not result in a response bias to an instrument seeking perceptions on topics of general professional interest; (b) using incentives to increase the number of responses to a survey did not introduce a response bias, although using a small monetary incentive (＄.25) was nonproductive in this inquiry; and (c) using multiple mailouts to increase the number of responses did not result in differences in response patterns across mailout requests.