On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 8:02 PM, Nicole Ellison <nellison@msu.edu> wrote:
I'm curious about the practice of only compensating participants who complete a survey. Don't most IRBs require that participants have the option of refusing to answer any questions they want, without jeopardizing their compensation?
I don't think that's the case. I'm not speaking for my shop but in my personal experience working with a few hundred institutions this is not an issue because not giving someone a post-survey compensation is different from penalizing them. The practical issue that tends to arise much more frequently is defining what "complete" means for a given survey since that is often the trigger for compensation. How many questions can respondents skip before we consider their survey to be "not complete?" Does responding to the last question indicate that the survey is complete no matter how many questions were skipped? Do we have any options or flexibility with our current software and resources? (Incidentally, one of the benefits of using compensation that has relatively low value - remember that the idea is to establish trust and reciprocity and not to reward participants - is that you can be lax about these decisions.) The real catch for many IRBs seems to be the nature of the compensation. They don't want the incentive to be out of proportion with the survey so that people feel compelled to participate just to receive or have a chance at receiving the compensation. As researchers, we should share that concern as those participants may give us poor (or no) data. Kevin