Smartphones have become versatile tools for data collection in the social and behavioural sciences. Yet the recruitment of study participants who are willing to install a research app on their smartphone and participate in high-frequency data collection remains a challenge. This talk presents the results from a recent experiment on the effect of tailored vs. non-tailored study invitations on participation rates and nonparticipation biases in smartphone app surveys. Following the leverage-salience theory, I hypothesize that people are more likely to participate if survey attributes that are personally important to them are made more salient in the survey request. Participants aged 18-65 from an offline-recruited online panel in Germany were invited to install a survey app on their smartphone and complete two to three short surveys on politics and society each day for five days. In the study invitation, they were randomly assigned either to a tailored message that referred to their primary motivation for participating in surveys (e.g., help science, express an opinion, receive a monetary incentive), or to a non-tailored message. The study will contribute to the growing body of research on how different study designs can influence representations errors in smartphone data collection.
Presented by:
Alexander Wenz (University of Mannheim)
Date & time:
May 20, 2026 12:30 pm - May 20, 2026 1:30 pm
Venue:
Online
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