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Despite the growing popularity of digital payment transactions in the United States, most survey participation incentives are still paid through cash or check and then distributed to respondents or potential sample members via direct mail. Though survey researchers have explored alternative incentives, such as e-gift cards, for online samples, there has been no study of electronic cash incentives—specifically paid through mobile pay applications—to date. In this article, we briefly review the literature on incentives used in online surveys and then examine survey incentive payment preferences among respondents using a small, web-based survey of younger adults. Our results suggest a greater preference for cash incentives paid through mobile applications than through direct mail, further highlighting the need for more research on the efficacy of electronically-delivered monetary incentives. 

Features of the survey measurement process may affect responses from respondents in various racial, ethnic, or cultural groups in different ways. When responses from multiethnic populations are combined, such variability in responding could increase variable error or bias results. The current study examines the survey response process among Black and White respondents answering questions about trust in medical researchers and participation in medical research. Using transcriptions from telephone interviews, we code a rich set of behaviors produced by respondents that past research has shown to be associated with measurement error, including long question-answer sequences, uncodable answers, requests for repetition or clarification, affective responses, and tokens. In analysis, we test for differences between Black and White respondents in the likelihood with which behaviors occur and examine whether the behaviors vary by specific categorizations of the questions, including whether the questions are racially focused. Overall, we find that White respondents produce more behaviors that indicate cognitive processing problems for racially focused questions, which may be interpreted as demonstrating a “cultural” difference in the display of cognitive processing and interaction. Data are provided by the 2013–2014 Voices Heard Survey, a computer-assisted telephone survey designed to measure respondents’ perceptions of barriers and facilitators to participating in medical research. 

Response time (RT) – the time elapsing from the beginning of question reading for a given question until the start of the next question – is a potentially important indicator of data quality that can be reliably measured for all questions in a computer-administered survey using a latent timer (i.e., triggered automatically by moving on to the next question). In interviewer-administered surveys, RTs index data quality by capturing the entire length of time spent on a question–answer sequence, including interviewer question-asking behaviors and respondent question-answering behaviors. Consequently, longer RTs may indicate longer processing or interaction on the part of the interviewer, respondent, or both. RTs are an indirect measure of data quality; they do not directly measure reliability or validity, and we do not directly observe what factors lengthen the administration time. In addition, either too long or too short RTs could signal a problem (Ehlen, Schober, and Conrad 2007). However, studies that link components of RTs (interviewers’ question reading and response latencies) to interviewer and respondent behaviors that index data quality strengthen the claim that RTs indicate data quality (Bergmann and Bristle 2019; Draisma and Dijkstra 2004; Olson, Smyth, and Kirchner 2019). In general, researchers tend to consider longer RTs as signaling processing problems for the interviewer, respondent, or both (Couper and Kreuter 2013; Olson and Smyth 2015; Yan and Olson 2013; Yan and Tourangeau 2008). Previous work demonstrates that RTs are associated with various characteristics of interviewers (where applicable), questions, and respondents in web, telephone, and face-to-face interviews (e.g., Couper and Kreuter 2013; Olson and Smyth 2015; Yan and Tourangeau 2008). We replicate and extend this research by examining how RTs are associated with various question characteristics and several established tools for evaluating questions. We also examine whether increased interviewer experience in the study shortens RTs for questions with characteristics that impact the complexity of the interviewer’s task (i.e., interviewer instructions and parenthetical phrases). We examine these relationships in the context of a sample of racially diverse respondents who answered questions about participation in medical research and their health.