Ethnic bias and design factors impact response rates of online travel surveys

Low response rates are pointed as a critical problem in online travel surveys. Tourism researchers need to strive to find ways to increase response rates in order to improve the surveys' coverage as well as representativeness. Through an experiment, this paper specifically examines the design f...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of global scholars of marketing science 2022, 32(2), , pp.129-144
Main Authors: Pan, Bing, Smith, Wayne W., Litvin, Stephen W., Yuan, Yulan, Woodside, Arch
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
context clues
Design factors
ethnic bias
response rate
travel surveys
경영학
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Low response rates are pointed as a critical problem in online travel surveys. Tourism researchers need to strive to find ways to increase response rates in order to improve the surveys' coverage as well as representativeness. Through an experiment, this paper specifically examines the design factors that provide social clues in online survey, and the timing of the solicitation. The results indicated that solicitations sent with a researcher's Western name induced dramatically more responses (>60%) than did the same solicitation sent with a Chinese name; the attachment of an authoritative title for the Chinese researcher did not mitigate the problem; surveys sent out on Saturday with a reminder on Monday generated the highest response rate; among the variations tested, wording of the solicitation email's subject line had insignificant impact on response rates. Details of the experiment and an explanation of results based upon underlying social factors are discussed.
ISSN:2163-9159
2163-9167
DOI:10.1080/21639159.2020.1808827