[Air-L] Question about reimbursing participants doing electronic surveys?

Kevin Guidry krguidry at gmail.com
Tue Aug 17 20:35:37 PDT 2010


On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 8:02 PM, Nicole Ellison <nellison at msu.edu> wrote:
>
>  I'm curious about the practice of only compensating participants who complete a survey. Don't most IRBs require that participants have the option of refusing to answer any questions they want, without
> jeopardizing their compensation?

I don't think that's the case.  I'm not speaking for my shop but in my
personal experience working with a few hundred institutions this is
not an issue because not giving someone a post-survey compensation is
different from penalizing them.

The practical issue that tends to arise much more frequently is
defining what "complete" means for a given survey since that is often
the trigger for compensation.  How many questions can respondents skip
before we consider their survey to be "not complete?"  Does responding
to the last question indicate that the survey is complete no matter
how many questions were skipped?  Do we have any options or
flexibility with our current software and resources?  (Incidentally,
one of the benefits of using compensation that has relatively low
value - remember that the idea is to establish trust and reciprocity
and not to reward participants - is that you can be lax about these
decisions.)

The real catch for many IRBs seems to be the nature of the
compensation.  They don't want the incentive to be out of proportion
with the survey so that people feel compelled to participate just to
receive or have a chance at receiving the compensation.  As
researchers, we should share that concern as those participants may
give us poor (or no) data.


Kevin



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