Resources and Free Stuff

Papers for your delectation and delight

Experiments with Online Survey Response – Incentives, personalized salutations, logos, senders. Do any of these things increase response rates to surveys? Do they affect data quality – either improving it by making the sample more representative of the population, or worsening it by making the sample less representative? Read all about it here! (An edited version of this paper was published in the May/June 2011 issue of CASE Currents magazine under the title “Become a Survey Sophisticate.” This is the original!!)

The Effects of Sponsorship on Answer Bias and Response Rates in Alumni Surveys – Does identifying the university as the sponsor of the survey bias the answers alumni give? Does it affect the response rate? All this – and more! – in a brief tasty paper summarizing the results of an experiment conducted with Stanford alumni.

 

Testimonials

“What a maverick. You betcha, doggone it!” – Caribou Barbie Palin

“Neat stuff! Now let’s crush this miserable worm before he steals our market share.” – Bill Gates

“Die luft der freiheit weht!” – Gerhard Casper, president emeritus of Stanford

“Did we actually pay this little gerbil?” – Former client who wishes to remain anonymous

 

More testimonials

 

How to conduct better research. Here are some useful tips – from a trustworthy source – on how to:

 

Deal with adversity.

Minimize non-response error.

Control costs.

Minimize coverage error.

Reduce staff turn-over.

Minimize worthless data.