The use of Web-based surveys is a new research methodology in higher education and as a surveying method it is still in the early stage of development. Compared to traditional methods, Web-based surveys have lower participation rates. Very few studies have examined effects of survey web page design on survey participation. The purpose of this study was to investigate how two types of survey Web page design (single-page and multiple-page design) and three reward methods (no-incentive, incentive, and lottery) effect college students’ participation in terms of response rate, time duration to complete a survey, and the number of answered items.
A survey instrument was designed in single-page and multiple-page format and delivered on the Web. Participants were undergraduate students in a Midwestern university. A sample frame of 6,000 undergraduates was randomly selected and randomly split into two groups based upon the single-page and multiple-page design. Participants in each design were then randomly assigned into three groups based on the reward method, no-incentive, online incentive, and lottery. All the perspective participants were send email invitations with a hotlink to the survey Websites. The study received 745 submitted surveys.
The research design utilized the Chi-Square test and two by three analysis of variance (ANOVA). In terms of submitted response rate, data analysis revealed no statistically significant difference between single-page and multiple-page design, butfound significant difference among the reward methods. Additionally, there was no significant relationship between survey design and reward method on response rate. The ANOVA analysis revealed that it took a significantly longer time to complete a multiple-page survey than a single-page survey. There was no interaction effect between survey page design and reward method on time duration to complete a survey. The study failed to identify any significant difference of number of answered items in the submitted surveys between the single-page and multiple-page design as well as among the three reward methods. There was no significant interaction between survey page design and reward method regarding the number of answered survey items.
Some additional findings concerning abandonment, drop outs, effect of follow-up reminders, and gender difference are presented. Limitations, conclusions, recommendations for future study are provided.