I am working on a questionnaire and am already breaking my head how I could persuade (busy) people to fill it in! I fear it that it will end up in the bin. I wondered whether a "reward" may tempt them. Would this be unethical? Has anyone got experience regarding this? For example "You can win a bottle of champagne etc. if you return the filled in questionnaire?"

If you give me £1000, I will fill it in

What psych students usually do is offer £5 per candidate. ie minimum wage.

Also you can put it on the web and send the link to this forum !!!

Think about some benefit they can get from your research...for example,attention of policy makers finally will be attracted to their problems etc.

The Psych dept at our uni is always advertising rewards - either cash per participant (usually only a few pounds), a draw to win something bigger, or uni credits. I don't think it is unethical (although you may want to mention it in the methodology)

Be careful if you plan to organize a raffle, prize draw etc to reward your participants - someone at my uni tried to do that but when she had already got some people to take part, she learnt that our university doesn't have a license to run such competitions. There wasn't any problem with rewarding participants with an amount in cash though.

I've known lots of people who have used incentives to get people to complete questionnaires/participate in studies (for example, questionnaires are all put into a raffle, and first drawn wins an MP3 player, 2nd prize wins x - etc, etc, etc ... or substitute the gadgets for cash prizes).

Remember ... if you look at most published studies they've also probably used some type of incentive to get people to participate, so if they can do it, than it shouldn't be a problem for 'mere' PhD students.

Thank you all for your feedback, this is useful.

UFO will think it over!

Regards