Does Prefilling Questions in a Longitudinal Survey Encourage Participation?

This article discusses an experiment embedded in the 2008 National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services that tested whether prefilling some fields in the annual questionnaire would encourage continued facility participation. The option, offered to facilities that completed a web questionnaire, resulted in a statistically significant increase in the number of web completes in the treatment group, suggesting that the option affected survey mode choice, which also minimized paper questionnaire editing and data processing costs.