A Comparison of Strategies for Recruiting Teachers Into Survey Panels

Abstract

We examine a range of options for recruiting teachers into a nationally representative survey panel. Recruitment strategies considered include a telephone-based approach and the use of promised incentives and pre-incentives of varying amounts and forms. Using a randomized experiment, we evaluate the effectiveness of five separate recruitment strategies and conduct a cost-benefit analysis. Our preferred strategy is one that uses a US$10 gift card as pre-incentive (it yielded a 27% rate of successful recruitment a cost of US$78 per recruited teacher). Statistical comparisons indicate that no other technique was superior to this strategy in terms of recruitment rate or cost-effectiveness. Efforts at refusal conversion after the initial approach were mostly ineffective. A comparison across demographic type characteristics of enrolled panelists and nonrespondents shows no substantial differences for any recruitment strategy considered. Hence, the potential for recruitment-level nonresponse to induce large bias into findings from surveys administered to the panel is minimal.

Keywords: educational research; incentives; response rates; sampling bias; survey methods; survey panels.

Figure 1

Flowchart illustrating the study design for recruitment of teachers.