Relevant Recruiting for Online Survey Participation [book]

Hannah Brenkert-Smith, Katherine Dickinson, Nicholas Flores
2018 unpublished
Administering a survey online has a number of practical benefits including lower costs, reductions in paperuse and data entry time, and a faster data collection time period. A significant challenge, however, entails creating and recruiting a relevant sample of respondents with specific characteristics when email lists are unavailable. In this case, we seek to encourage researcher conversation about relevant and effective recruitment strategies by describing the extensive pretesting process we
more » ... dertook to develop our survey sampling and recruitment strategy for a study of wildfire mitigation behaviors in Western Colorado. Pretesting response rates varied from 3% to 30%, with the inclusion of a US$2 billion in the recruitment envelope yielding the highest response rate. The actual study subsequently used this approach and resulted in a 35% response rate. Learning Outcomes By the end of this case, students should be able to Identify possible challenges to constructing a relevant population sample when conducting a survey online Articulate potential challenges of online survey participation using a mail recruitment tool Start to identify creative solutions to overcome recruitment challenges for recruiting for online survey Project Overview and Context: Defining the Problem Understanding the social dynamics of natural resource and natural hazard dilemmas often requires collecting data from the people whose beliefs, behaviors, and perspectives influence problem framing, management, and resolution. In the case of wildfire, property owners' risk reduction decisions in the areas where wildland and private properties meet, the wildland-urban interface (WUI), play an important role in wildfire outcomes. Responsiveness to a survey on a salient topic is expected to be higher than to a topic that isn't salient. However, responsiveness to recruitment for proposed research can only be based on an informed guess unless one has been engaged in on-going research on the specific topic or in a specific geographic area. Although secondary data sources (e.g., Census data) may provide some basic information about the population affected by a particular natural resource/hazard dilemma, these data sources are often inadequate for more in-depth analyses of the social dynamics surrounding such dilemmas. Further inquiry into natural resource/hazard beliefs and behaviors typically requires collecting primary data from relevant publics. When pursuing insights into socially and geographically specific dilemmas, in-person data collection is often a preferred approach; however, the time and cost requirements of such efforts often limit sample sizes. And yet, the administration of surveys to a broader, more representative sample of the relevant public presents a number of challenges, perhaps the greatest of which is obtaining adequate response rates from a population that is relevant to the natural resource or natural hazard dilemma.
doi:10.4135/9781526438027 fatcat:uq7bczdbjjbezef4lctphsevte