[Air-L] Survey completion rate

[Nancy Baym]

By completion do you mean how many of those who click through to it 
actually finish it?

On the survey I'm running right now I have WAY less than 80% 
completion rate. It is more like 55%, which I think is on a par with 
the last one I did. The "completion" figures are off too, though, 
because SurveyGizmo (which I am very happy with BTW) calls things 
completed if people went through to the last page even if they didn't 
do large sections of the stuff in between, so 50% may be more 
accurate. On the other hand, some of the surveys it categorizes as 
'partial' are more complete than those it calls "saved" (ie 
completed), and I have manually deleted many partials if I could see 
that they were either empty or had only the first page filled out, 
which would make the completion rate even lower than 50%.

I figure it makes sense that more people would be curious to see what 
it was about than would be interested in doing it, and also figure 
that the IRB form they encounter first would turn some people off. My 
survey is pretty long too, so I'm not surprised to have a lot of drop 
outs along the way.

I am curious to hear others' experiences too.

Nancy

>I currently have an online survey underway, and as it slogs along, it has
>made me curious about something.  What, generally, do people find to be the
>completion rate of their online surveys?  This is a stat to which I probably
>wouldn't have access in a traditional paper survey -- I wouldn't be able to
>differentiate between people who started the questionnaire and didn't
>complete it, and those who just didn't fill it out at all -- so it's an
>interesting feature of this survey format.  I'm finding that so far, with my
>survey the completion rate is hovering around 80%.  Is that similar to
>others' experiences?
>
>And FWIW, it's a survey about interactive media use and horse race betting
>in the U.S.  So if any of you bet on horse racing in the U.S. with any
>regularity, or know someone who does, feel free to scurry on over to (or
>send them to):
>
>http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=4hvRfxac4nysaLPYd_2bzIlg_3d_3d
>
>Although really, I'm publicizing it in horse racing forums.  But I am
>curious to hear about completion rates of others' online surveys.
>
>
>Holly
>
>--
>Holly Kruse
>Faculty of Communication
>The University of Tulsa
>600 S. College Ave.
>Tulsa, OK 74104
>918-631-3845
>holly-kruse at utulsa.edu or holly.kruse at gmail.com
>http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~holly-kruse
>
>
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