Medical care
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study Clinical Trial
Conducting physician mail surveys on a limited budget. A randomized trial comparing $2 bill versus $5 bill incentives.
The effects of incentive size on physicians' response rates to a mail survey were determined. ⋯ A $5 bill incentive yielded a higher response rate among the physicians in this study than did a $2 bill incentive. Moreover, the powerful effect of the incentive size, combined with the consequent decline in the costs of subsequent mailing waves, suggests that resources in a fixed survey budget are allocated more efficiently to increasing the initial incentive rather than to providing a third wave to nonresponders.