In the context of declining response rates, monetary incentives have become a valuable tool for encouraging survey participation. Offering higher value monetary incentives to underrepresented groups of the population has the potential to improve representativeness while making more efficient use of research budgets. However, evidence on the effectiveness of differential incentives remains limited and mixed, especially in the UK – and a number of ethical questions remain unresolved. These include when it is justifiable to offer different incentive amounts for the same survey task, and how such decisions can be explained to ethics review boards and study participants.
This workshop presents findings from a Survey Futures project focused on the use of differential incentives, covering a synthesis of existing evidence, ethical guidance, and practical recommendations for implementation. We also present findings from an experiment embedded in the 2025 British Social Attitudes Survey, which tested whether offering higher incentives to respondents in more deprived areas improves response rates, sample representativeness, and cost-efficiency compared with a uniform incentive approach.
The workshop is aimed at survey researchers and practitioners, including staff from survey agencies, government bodies, funding organisations, and principal investigators.
The event will include three talks, followed by a discussion:
- A review of the evidence and survey practice guide on differential monetary incentives in social surveys
- Experimental evidence on targeting monetary incentives in a probability base large-scale cross-sectional survey
- A practitioner guide on ethical aspects to consider when using differential monetary incentives
- Q + A session and discussion