The Effect of Customer Surveys on Nonrespondents’ Attitudes and Behaviors: An Abstract

Abstract

This research is motivated by the unexplored intersection between surveys participation effects (i.e., the mere-measurement effect; see Dholakia 2010 for a review) and survey nonresponse. Specifically, we investigate whether survey invitations influence attitudes and behaviors of nonrespondents. We define such a “nonmeasurement effect” as a causal effect in the spirit of Rubin’s Causal Model (e.g., Rubin 1974): It is the difference between survey nonrespondents’ loyalty toward the company and their potential loyalty had they not been invited to the survey. Common sense suggests that the mere act of declining a survey invitation is unlikely to alter consumers’ subsequent cognitions and purchase decision processes; particularly if these occur weeks or even months later or involve big ticket items. A lack of impact of survey invitations for nonrespondents is consistent with the most frequently proposed mechanism behind the mere-measurement effect, self-generated validity (Feldman and Lynch 1988), because nonrespondents do not cognitively process and provide responses to survey items. However, the positivity effect explanation from the mere-measurement effect literature (Dholakia et al. 2004) suggests that there could be a positive psychological and behavioral effect of survey nonresponse whereas a new theoretical angle, attitude construction theory (e.g., Schwarz 2006, 2007), predicts a negative effect of inviting nonrespondents to a survey. In three studies, we provide first-time evidence that the subtle, seemingly insignificant act of not responding to market research studies has a strong and enduring negative nonmeasurement effect on customers’ attitudinal and behavioral loyalty toward the company. First, a large-scale field experiment using instrumental variable methods finds that survey invitations impair nonrespondents’ subsequent purchase behaviors. In line with attitude construction theory, customers seem to interpret their nonresponse behavior as a manifestation of their own negative attitude toward the company. However, if contextual factors subjectively explain the nonresponse decision, the effect disappears. Second, and practically relevant, we use these findings to provide insights into potential countermeasures to the undesirable nonmeasurement effect. In two controlled experiments, we test a proactive “invitation-framing strategy” and a reactive “reply-framing strategy.” Results suggest that interviewers can prevent the effect by phrasing the survey invitation to highlight contextual reasons for a potential nonresponse decision (e.g., “Do you have a couple of minutes to participate?”) or by alluding to contextual reasons in their reply to an already occurred nonresponse decision (e.g., “I apologize for the interruption, I appreciate that you are busy”). Generally, we merely offer a first step toward understanding a new phenomenon in survey research and hope to provide new impulses for the survey research community. References Available Upon Request