ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

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Session Details

Over the past decade, response and participation rates have declined in many social surveys and large-scale assessments. These challenges are particularly pronounced in voluntary and low-stakes settings, where initial participation, continued engagement, and response quality depend strongly on respondents’ motivation and willingness to invest effort. Declining participation can reduce effective sample sizes, increase the risk of nonresponse bias, and threaten representativeness and data quality.

Gamification has increasingly been proposed as a means of addressing these challenges. Broadly understood as the integration of game elements into non-game contexts, gamification may encourage participation, sustain engagement, reduce perceived burden, prevent breakoff, and limit insufficient-effort responding. Approaches range from isolated elements, such as points, badges, progress feedback, or narratives, to more comprehensive game-based assessments.

However, the use of gamification also raises important methodological questions. Interventions designed to increase motivation may alter response processes, affect the interpretation of tasks, introduce mode or setting effects, or influence participants differently across social and demographic groups. In longitudinal and comparative studies, gamified designs may additionally threaten measurement equivalence and the comparability of scores across groups, settings, and time.

This session invites methodological and empirical contributions examining both the opportunities and limitations of gamification in surveys and assessments. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to gamification and response quality, insufficient-effort responding, test-taking motivation, breakoff and completion, game-based competence assessment, measurement validity, fairness and subgroup differences, self-administration and standardization, and longitudinal comparability. Contributions developing methodological frameworks for evaluating gamified designs are also welcome.

The session aims to move the debate beyond whether gamification simply “works.” Instead, it asks when gamification improves participation, engagement, or effort, for whom these benefits occur, and under which conditions they can be achieved without compromising valid, fair, and comparable measurement.