Customization and Choice Options in Online Surveys: Can They Influence the Willingness to Participate?

The use of online access panels, which is now common practice in a scientific context, is accompanied by several challenges, such as achieving a sample composition that corresponds to the composition of the population. One reason for this is that fewer low-educated, younger, and elderly people are registered in online-access panels, making it difficult to reach these groups to a sufficient extent. Market research companies then often use several online access panels, which can differ in various aspects (e.g., monetary rewards). To avoid this potential source of error, it is important to increase the participation and completion rate per online access panel.

One lever for this could be to recognize that different groups of participants, including the less educated, younger, and elderly participants mentioned above, have specific needs in terms of survey participation. This represents a challenge that standardized surveys generally have to face (e.g., Dillman et al. 2014). Online surveys have a decisive advantage in this regard: they offer technical possibilities to take into account the individual needs of the participants and the specific requirements of the survey situation.

This study addresses the research question of whether customization and choice options in online surveys conducted via commercial online access panels have a positive influence on the willingness to participate and, in addition, on the willingness to complete the survey.

In an online survey conducted in 2024, the survey participants of a commercial online access panel were offered several options for adapting the survey to their personal needs (e.g., additional explanations of terms) and the specific survey situation (e.g., alternative question presentations for device-specific display problems). To investigate the above-mentioned research question, the survey participants were randomly assigned to three different groups, which differed in terms of the announcement and offer of customization and choice options.