Does the Payment of Incentives Create Expectation Effects?

Increasing use of incentive payments to survey respondents raises the threat of several unintended consequences, among them the creation of expectations for future payments and the possibility of a deterioration in the quality of response. Such deterioration may come about either as a direct result of substituting external for internal motivation, or as a consequence of expectations for rewards that go unmet by the survey organization. The findings from the present study are somewhat reassuring with respect to both of these unintended outcomes. Although people who have received a monetary incentive in the past are significantly more likely than those who have not to endorse the statement that people should be paid for doing surveys like this, they are actually more likely to participate in a subsequent survey, in spite of receiving no further payments. And respondents who received an incentive 6 months earlier are no more likely than those who received no incentive to refuse to answer (or to answer don't know) to a series of 18 key questions on the survey. Furthermore, they are more likely than other respondents to express favorable attitudes toward the usefulness of surveys like this. The generality of these findings, however, needs much further testing