Trial reportEuropean journal of epidemiology2010
Can incentives undermine intrinsic motivation to participate in epidemiologic surveys?
Trial report in European journal of epidemiology, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Methods to increase response to postal and electronic questionnaires.The Cochrane database of systematic reviews · 2023Pooled it
- The use of incentives in vulnerable populations for a telephone survey: a randomized controlled trial.BMC research notes · 2012Trial
- Evaluating strategies to recruit health researchers to participate in online survey research.BMC medical research methodology · 2024Article
- Can incentives improve survey data quality in developing countries?: results from a field experiment in India.Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A, (Statistics in Society) · 2018Article
- Increasing participation in a vector control campaign: a cluster randomised controlled evaluation of behavioural economic interventions in Peru.BMJ global health · 2018Article
- Recovery, work-life balance and work experiences important to self-rated health: A questionnaire study on salutogenic work factors among Swedish primary health care employees.Work (Reading, Mass.) · 2018Article
- The Rotterdam Study: 2012 objectives and design update.European journal of epidemiology · 2011Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Response rates to surveys are decreasing. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the use of lottery tickets as incentives in an epidemiologic control group. A self-administered questionnaire was sent to parents in the municipality of Stockholm, Sweden, who were to be used as a control group in a study addressing stress in parents of children with cancer. A stratified random sample of 450 parents were randomized into three incentive groups: (a) no incentive; (b) a promised incentive of one lottery ticket to be received upon reply; (c) a promised incentive of one lottery ticket to be received upon reply and an additional lottery ticket upon reply within 1 week. The overall response rate across the three groups was 65.3%. The response rate was highest in the no incentive group (69.3%) and lowest in the one plus one lottery ticket group (62.0%). In a survival analysis, the difference between the two response curves was significant by the log-rank test (P = 0.04), with the no incentive group having a shorter time to response than the incentive group. Our findings suggest that the use of lottery tickets as incentives to increase participation in a mail questionnaire among parents may be less valuable or even harmful. Incentives may undermine motivation in studies in which the intrinsic motivation of the respondents is already high.
Indexed as
Identifiers
20157845What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.