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

[Fred Stutzman]

Assuming your sample is larger than five, you'll face a lot of administrative overhead trying to contact each participant.  Furthermore, such "contacts" are regulated by the IRB - you would need to write that into your protocol, and I have a feeling an IRB might punt (exception is if the gifts are over $200).

I would do one of two things - either have the subjects enter the verification code at the end of the survey (and you maintain a spreadsheet/database linking the code to an identifier), or have the subjects enter their email address at the end of the survey.  Either way, you'll need to write this into your IRB and have a protocol for decoupling the PII.

The end goal should be protecting participant privacy, and minimizing administrative burden.  On that tangent, I recently did a mini-analysis comparing iTunes and Amazon gift cards as survey incentives.  Compared to iTunes, Amazon is much, much easier to manage.  More here: http://fstutzman.com/2010/07/21/itunes-vs-amazon-as-survey-incentive/

On Aug 17, 2010, at 11:51 AM, Reusche, Christian Fernando wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm designing a set of web surveys for research purposes to assess mental health literacy.  I will submit my protocol through IRB, and subjects will be protected and de-identified.  The question I have is with respect to compensation.  Participants will have a verify code, and I wanted to compensate them with an electronic gift card after completion of the surveys.  My idea was to call the participant to confirm the verify code, and after verification forward them the gift card.  I wanted to know if this protocol seemed suitable, or what protocols are there for compensating participants after completion of an online survey?  If you have any insight into this issue, I would appreciate it.
> 
> Thanks,
> Christian Reusche
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--
Fred Stutzman 
Ph.D. Candidate and Teaching Fellow 
School of Information and Library Science, UNC-Chapel Hill 
fred at fredstutzman.com | (919) 260-8508 | http://fredstutzman.com/