Thursday, June 02, 2005


Response rates, according to Wikipedia

If you go to the Wikipedia entry for Survey research, specifically the part about Survey methods, you see a brief outline of Telephone, Mail, Online, personal in-home, and personal mall intercept methodologies.

I want you to consider the response rates listed for phone (25%-50%), mail (5%-30%), and online (2%-30%). Do they seem reasonable to you? I hope so, because I entered them into that particular article in the Wikipedia. (In case you don't know already, anyone can edit the Wikipedia -- it's an open-code encyclopedia, an amazing living document. If you haven't used and edited Wikipedia yet, do so today.)

Prior to my edits, an earlier author had pegged the response rates at 40%-60% for phone, and 30%-60% for online. I thought those were unreasonably optimistic and/or grossly outdated, so I changed them. To see the specific changes I made in the Wikipedia, check out this link.

I'd be curious to know what others in the field of survey research think, so please comment.

1 Comments:

At 2:20 AM, July 21, 2008, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi, Gregory!

I've never conducted any formal study on response rate on survey research but according to my experiences, and experiences of others, online survey yields the very low response rate, maybe about 2%, while interview (direct/personal interview, not by phone) yields the highest response, maybe up to 90%. I've never conducted mail survey and telephone interview, though.

 

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