engleski

Do pictures have an impact on Web survey response rates in Eastern Croatian enterprises?

In order to collect certain information and data from a large number ofenterprises quite fast, a web survey seems to be the most appropriate tool. However, due to different reasons, response rates in web surveys are decreasing. In order to avoid insufficient response rates and problems arising from them, researchers have to make additional efforts to increase response rates in business web surveys. Those additional efforts can be rather expensive and time consuming. The aim of the paper is to inspect whether the use of different pictures could have an impact on response rates in web business surveysto be conducted using enterprises from Eastern Croatia as a sample. In order to observe the abovenamed issue, the web survey about the use of statistical methods in limited liability enterprises from five Eastern Croatian counties was conducted.Three different questionnaire versionswere developed: without, with “positive” and with “negative” pictures. The research results have shown that out of 3, 861 Eastern Croatian enterprises that were contactedonly 125 or 3.2% enterprises opened and started providing answers to the survey questions. However, out of those 125 enterprises 68 or 54.4% enterprises completed the web questionnaire resulting in the overall response rate of 1.8%.If response rates are analysed with reference to pictures, it can be concluded that presence or absence of pictures does not have astatistically significant impact on the response rates. However, this conclusion was made on a rather small sample of enterprises. Therefore, such research should be repeated using a bigger sample and questionnaires including more pictures. What should also be investigated is the impact of different pictures on responses.

Eastern Croatia ; Enterprise ; Picture ; Response rate ; Web survey

Acknowledgement: This work has been in part supported by Croatian Science Foundation under the project STatistical Modelling for REspoNse to Crisis and Economic GrowTH in WeStern Balkan Countries – STRENGTHS (project no.HRZZ-IP-2013-11-9402).