Respondent commitment: applying techniques from face-to-face interviewing to online collection of employment data

Answering questions completely, accurately and honestly is not always the top priority for survey respondents. How might researchers motivate respondents to be more conscientious? One possibility is to elicit agreement from respondents to work hard and provide complete and accurate information. In their pioneering work in the 1970s and 80s, Charles Cannell and his colleagues applied well-established research in sociology and social psychology to survey response behavior in Face-to-Face interviews and demonstrated the promise of directly asking respondents to commit to conscientious performance. The study reported here extends this approach to online surveys, specifically a German employment survey. The impact of respondent commitment on the quality of responses is assessed both indirectly and directly (by validating responses against administrative records). This study produced a number of promising effects for asking respondents to commit to providing complete, accurate, and honest answers, particularly for those who committed versus those who were invited to commit but did not.