The effects of electronic alert letters for internet surveys of academic scientists

Survey alert letters improve response rates and assure potential respondents that the research is legitimate and of high quality. Pre-notification by mail increases response rates for web surveys because it represents a second mode of communication and contributes to increases in respondent trust and study legitimacy. Due to work-from-home orders in response to COVID-19, postal alert letters are unlikely to reach research participants at their place of employment. We conducted three experiments testing the effects of sending academic scientists a pre-notification email message on web survey response rates as compared to no alert email message and variation in the timing of the pre-notification. The data comes from three random national samples of university-based scientists that were conducted during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two of three experiments suggest that email alert pre-notifications can have a minor effect on improving response rates to web surveys of academic scientists. The timing of those pre-notification messages, though, had no effect on survey response. These findings indicate pre-notification messages remain useful when studying academic scientists. Future research should compare the effects of electronic as compared to postal pre-notification on survey response among scientists, as postal pre-notification requires extensive resources.