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The use of differential incentives is gaining momentum as survey researchers seek innovative ways to improve response rates, reduce non-response bias, maximise inclusivity by encouraging participation amongst harder-to-reach groups and make more efficient use of limited research budgets. Differential incentives take many forms, including offering larger incentives to specific sample subgroups or varying incentive amounts across the fieldwork period.

However, despite the increasing adoption of differential incentives, important methodological, operational and ethical questions remain unresolved.

We define differential incentives as any design in which the incentives offered varies across respondents or stages of data collection including:

incentives targeted at specific population subgroups incentives contingent on survey participation within a certain timeframe (i.e. “early-bird” incentives);

incentives offered at the end of fieldwork to encourage participation amongst initially non-responsive cases

incentive strategies that vary across waves of longitudinal studies

We welcome empirical (including experimental) contributions that examine the impact of differential incentive approaches on participation, representativeness, non-response bias, overall data quality and importantly, cost-effectiveness.

We also welcome submissions which focus on operational challenges and the ethical implications of offering different incentives including issues of fairness, informed consent, transparency and the disclosure of the differential incentive approach to participants, and the potential for stigmatising specific population sub-groups or other unintended consequences when particular groups are offered different incentives.

While we welcome submissions that experimentally compare differential incentive strategies with standard incentive designs, studies based solely on random assignment of respondents to different incentive conditions (e.g. higher versus lower incentive amounts, or incentive versus no incentive) are better suited to a general session on survey incentives.