Factors Affecting Respondents' Engagement with Survey Tasks
ISBN: 978-1-78-190287-5, eISBN: 978-1-78-190288-2
Publication date: 29 January 2013
Abstract
Purpose — The research was designed to explore people's willingness/ability to understand complex road user charges. However, the results raise issues about respondent engagement and ecological validity and so have important implications for questionnaire practice.
Methodology — Computer-based experiments administered in the United Kingdom and Germany gathered respondents' estimates of road user charges along with their response latencies, personal characteristics, acceptance of road charging, assessments of task complexity and attitudes to analytical tasks.
Findings — The results demonstrate questionnaire learning effects and show the effect of personal characteristics on the accuracy and speed of questionnaire completion. The tendency of males, younger people and students to complete the task more quickly is interesting as is the fact that fewer and smaller errors were made by participants who claimed to gain satisfaction from completing a task which has involved mental effort. Engagement was seen to vary with personal characteristics, attitudes to decision making, task complexity and acceptance of the policy being tested. A key finding is that disengagement was more evident among participants who were broadly supportive of road charging than among those who were not.
Implications — The findings have important implications for the design of data collection exercises and for the interpretation of resulting data. It is concluded that repeated choice experiments are an inappropriate source of data on responses to unfamiliar circumstances. The collection of data on response latencies and the inclusion of questions on respondents' attitudes to task completion is a strongly recommended addition to standard questionnaire practice. The extent to which disengagement in an experimental context is, or is not, indicative of real-world behaviour is an important and urgent subject for further research.
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Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
We are pleased to acknowledge that this work originated in the EU-funded DIFFERENT project. We would also like to acknowledge the time made available by the Universities of Leeds and Dresden to allow us to complete the further work. We are very keen to thank our colleagues Denise Obst, Phil Wickham, Nusrat Walid and Tony Magee for their contributions to earlier stages of this work and to thank anonymous referees for their useful comments on our initial draft.
Citation
Bonsall, P., Schade, J., Roessger, L. and Lythgoe, B. (2013), "Factors Affecting Respondents' Engagement with Survey Tasks
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013 Emerald Group Publishing Limited