Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access published online on August 21, 2008
Public Opinion Quarterly, doi:10.1093/poq/nfn027
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The "Downstream" Effect of Token Prepaid Cash Incentives to Parents on Their Young Adult Children’s Survey Participation
Address correspondence to Sue L. Mann; e-mail: smann{at}fhcrc.org.
Our data collection procedure for young adult (YA) follow-up surveys precedes the survey with a request to the parent for locator information on the YA. We tested how providing a token prepaid cash incentive to their parents would affect both parent response and subsequent (i.e., "downstream") survey response from the YAs. Parents were randomly assigned to one of three incentive conditions: $0 (N = 97), $1 (N = 98), and $2 (N = 97). We found strong evidence for a parent incentive effect on parent response during the parent mail/phone sequence, and mild evidence at the end of the parent effort. We found no parent incentive effect on final YA survey response. We did, however, find an effect on early YA survey response. For example, at 30 days following the initial survey mailing, YA survey response was 46.4 percent, 61.2 percent, and 58.8 percent for those whose parents received $0, $1, and $2, respectively (p =.03). Also, we found that giving $1 or $2 to parents increased the speed of YA survey response by 34 percent (p =.02). We found no evidence for a differential parent incentive effect on the speed of survey response between female and male YAs. The increase in the YA survey response speed imparted by a $1 or $2 incentive to parents can more than pay for itself by substantially reducing the proportion of YAs requiring intensive follow-up efforts.
SUE L. MANN is with Youth and Adult Smoking Studies. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 1100 Fairview Ave. N., M2-C826, PO Box 19024, Seattle, WA 98109-1024, USA.
DIANA J. LYNN is with the Statistical Center for HIV and AIDS Research and Prevention, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 1100 Fairview Ave. N., LE-400, PO Box 19024, Seattle, WA 98109-1024, USA.
ARTHUR V. PETERSON JR is with the University of Washington and with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 1100 Fairview Ave. N., M2-C826, PO Box 19024, Seattle, WA 98109-1024, USA. This research is supported by a grant from the National Cancer Institute, NIH R01 CA109652. We wish to thank Kathleen Kealey, Maura Davis, Anya Luke-Killam, and Jonathan Bricker for their suggestions and help reviewing the paper, and to Jingmin Liu and Pat Marek for their advice on statistical methodology. We also wish to thank the Public Opinion Quarterly editor and the referees for their extremely helpful comments.
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