The Impact of Varying Incentives on Physician Survey Response Rates: An experiment in the context of COVID-19

Since 2018, our research team has fielded national, probability surveys of internal medicine physicians. We expected our usually high response rates to fall in the 2021 iteration of the survey due to challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic and our inability to offer all participants a $50 upfront incentive as we had previously. To understand the independent impacts of the lower incentive and surveying physicians in the context of the pandemic, we fielded an experiment varying the incentive amount physicians were offered. Our results suggest that while higher incentives still lead to higher response rates during COVID-19, the higher incentive did not achieve comparable pre-COVID response rates. We conclude with additional data on the impact of the incentives on survey cost, number of reminders needed, and the mode in which respondents chose to complete the survey.