The objective of this experiment is to understand whether a rephrasing of the appeal to altruism in advance letters and invitation letters could enhance participation rates. Specifically, Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory states that requests based on avoiding a negative outcome are more likely to achieve compliance than requests based on achieving a positive outcome. In the longitudinal survey context, prospect theory implies that it should be more effective to emphasis the negative consequences of not participating than the positive consequences of participating. However, to date all advance and invitation letters on Understanding Society, including IP, have relied on appeals to altruism that solely emphasise positive consequences of participating. The objective, therefore, is to test whether co-operation rates depend on whether the appeal is worded positively or negatively, and whether this in turn depends on moderating factors such as length of time in the panel and previous participation behaviour.
There is one controlling variable for this experiment, for whether a household is assigned to the positive outcome or negative outcome wording of the advanced letter. Households were randomly assigned to one of these two conditions with an equal 50/50 split. The allocation of respondents for this experiment is controlled by the following variable:
ff_mailwordw10 in file j_hhsamp_ip: Outcome wording of advance letter at IP10
1 Positive outcome wording letter
2 Negative outcome wording letter
