McMaster Hope Seib, LeardMann Cynthia A, Speigle Steven, Dillman Don A
Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, Bethesda, MD, 20817, USA.
Department of Sociology and the Social and Economic Sciences Research Center, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, 99164, USA.
BMC Med Res Methodol. 2017 Apr 26;17(1):73. doi: 10.1186/s12874-017-0337-1.
Previous research has found that a "web-push" approach to data collection, which involves contacting people by mail to request an Internet survey response while withholding a paper response option until later in the contact process, consistently achieves lower response rates than a "paper-only" approach, whereby all respondents are contacted and requested to respond by mail.
An experiment was designed, as part of the Millennium Cohort Family Study, to compare response rates, sample representativeness, and cost between a web-push and a paper-only approach; each approach comprised 3 stages of mail contacts. The invited sample (n = 4,935) consisted of spouses married to U.S. Service members, who had been serving in the military between 2 and 5 years as of October, 2011.
The web-push methodology produced a significantly higher response rate, 32.8% compared to 27.8%. Each of the 3 stages of postal contact significantly contributed to response for both treatments with 87.1% of the web-push responses received over the Internet. The per-respondent cost of the paper-only treatment was almost 40% higher than the web-push treatment group. Analyses revealed no meaningfully significant differences between treatment groups in representation.
These results provide evidence that a web-push methodology is more effective and less expensive than a paper-only approach among young military spouses, perhaps due to their heavy reliance on the internet, and we suggest that this approach may be more effective with the general population as they become more uniformly internet savvy.
先前的研究发现，“网络推送”式数据收集方法，即在通过邮件联系人们以请求其进行网络调查回复时，直到联系过程后期才提供纸质回复选项，其回复率始终低于“仅纸质”方法，即所有受访者都通过邮件被联系并被请求回复。
作为千禧队列家庭研究的一部分，设计了一项实验，以比较“网络推送”和“仅纸质”方法之间的回复率、样本代表性和成本；每种方法都包括3个邮件联系阶段。受邀样本（n = 4935）由与美国军人结婚的配偶组成，截至2011年10月，这些军人已服役2至5年。
“网络推送”方法产生了显著更高的回复率，分别为32.8%和27.8%。两种处理方式下，邮政联系的3个阶段均对回复有显著贡献，“网络推送”回复中有87.1%是通过互联网收到的。“仅纸质”处理方式的每位受访者成本比“网络推送”处理组高出近40%。分析显示，处理组之间在代表性方面没有显著有意义的差异。
这些结果表明，在年轻军人配偶中，“网络推送”方法比“仅纸质”方法更有效且成本更低，这可能是由于他们对互联网的高度依赖，并且我们认为随着普通人群变得更加普遍地精通互联网，这种方法可能对他们更有效。
