College and Research Libraries Research Notes 391 Information Systems Consultants. Videodisc and Optical Digital Disk Technologies and Their Applications in Libraries, A Report to the Council on Library Resources. Washington, D.C.: Council on Library Re- sources, 1985. Krayeski, Felix. ''Transition of an Image System-From Paper to Microfiche to Optical Disk.'' Journal of Imaging Technology 10:161-62 (1984). Lunin, Lois, ed . "Perspectives on Videodisc and Optical Disk: Technology, Research, and Applica- tions.'' Journal of the American Society of Information Science (Nov. 1983), 406-40. Nugent, William. ''Applications of Digital Optical Disks in Library Preservation and Reference.'' Pro- ceedings of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS), 52:771-75 (1983). Nugent, William. ''Optical Disk Technology.'' In Minutes of the One Hundredth Meeting of the Association of Research Libraries, Scottsdale, Ariz., August 6-7, 1982 (1982), 71-79. Nugent, William, and Jessica Harding. "Optical Storage of Page Images and Pictorial Data- Opportunities and Needed Advances in Information Retrieval." Proceedings of the 1983 Annual Con- ference of the Association for Computing Machinery, New York, October 24-26, 1983 (1983), 79-82 . Price, Joseph. "Optical Disk Pilot Program at the Library of Congress." Videodisc and Optical Disk, 4:424-32 (Dec. 1984). Thompson, Mark. "High-Tech Library." American Way (Sept. 1984), 36-40. The Effect of Service A ware ness on Survey Response Ruth A. Page II and Edward J. Lusk The authors had examined the relative effect of university or library sponsorship in a 1984 sur- vey of computer utilization of Wharton School M.B.A. 'sand faculty. In the intervening year, many new services have been offered to the M.B.A.'s. The survey was redistributed. The response rate to the library was significantly higher for students who had used the new ser- vices than for those who had not. This result suggests that the interaction of sponsorship and the respondent group, not sponsorship it- self, is the critical variable. A possible sex bias between the male professor and female librarian was found not to be significant. In 1984 the authors conducted a survey of students and faculty of the Wharton School to determine the extent to which personal computers were used for online searching. In developing the survey, sponsorship became an issue. Previous re- search on sponsorship suggested that if there is a perceived prestige difference be- tween sponsoring groups, there may be a significant difference in the response rates. In general, the more prestigious sponsor elicits the higher response rate. Sponsorship as a factor affecting ques- tionnaire return rate has been examined in numerous studies in the literature. Doob and Peterson both found that university sponsorship increased response rate over business firm sponsorship by 10 and 13 percent, respectively . 1' 2 Peterson sug- gested that sponsorship was the domi- nant factor influencing returns. 3 Jones and Linda also found that university sponsor- ship significantly increased response rates. 4 Several other studies are cited by W. Jack Duncan in his review article. 5 Fur- ther, Jones, based on previous studies by Scott and by Sudman and Ferber, sug- Ruth A. Pagell is head of public services at the Lippincott Library of the Wharton School, University of Pennsyl- vania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104. She is also an associate professor at Drexel College of Information Stud- ies and instructor of decision sciences at Wharton. Edward J. Lusk is associate professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, and director of biostatistics for the Cancer Cen- ter, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. 392 College & Research Libraries gested that sponsorship mar. interact with population characteristics. 6' ' 8 Sponsorship of library-related question- naires was examined by Nitecki, who found no difference among a prestigious sponsorship (the ALA), a moderately prestigious sponsorship (a library), and the least prestigious sponsorship (a grad- uate student).9 The effects of sponsorship on the response rate to a library question- naire were also examined by Pagell and Lusk. 10 To ascertain whether a prestige factor existed between the library and the faculty as sponsoring groups, the authors sent intramural mail questionnaires with return addresses that were distributed randomly between the faculty member as a sponsor and a member of the library as a sponsor. It was determined that sponsor- ship by faculty produced a significantly higher response rate for M.B.A.'s than sponsorship by the library. The inference drawn from this study was that the faculty sponsor was perceived as more presti- gious than the library sponsor. There was no statistically significant effect for the fac- ulty regarding their response rate. Since the 1984 survey, there have been major changes in the environment of the library. These changes have resulted from the introduction of various technologies that are available to the M.B.A. students. The most prominent of these are free end- user searching and distributed databases (Halperin and Pagell). 11 The purpose of this paper is to report the results of the investigation of the relation- ship of a change in the service configura- tion of the library on the questionnaire re- sponse rate. Consider now the experi- mental design. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN Because of the focused nature of the re- search, the 1984 survey instrument was redistributed. However, after reviewing the 1984 survey results, the authors felt it . was necessary to control for possible sex bias. It was suggested to the authors that the male professor-female librarian spon- sorship of the 1984 survey may have con- founded the results. For this reason, the questionnaires were sent to all M.B.A.'s (n = 1,400) and faculty (n = 250), experi- mentally arranged as follows: Jul~ 1986 • 25 percent of the questionnaires were to be returned to a faculty address in . the Wharton School, using the name of the female researcher, with the title associ- ate professor. • 25 percent of the questionnaires were to be returned to a faculty address in the Wharton School, using the name of the male researcher, with the title associate professor. • 25 percent of the questionnaires were to be returned to the library, using the name of the female researcher. • 25 percent of the questionnaires were to be returned to the library, using the name of the male researcher. Use of the free end-user search service is the parameter chosen to measure aware- ness of the new service configuration. The research hypotheses were: • H1: The effect of the change in service configuration will manifest itself in a change in the pattern of questionnaire responses. For the students who had not utilized the new services in the library during the year, the same results as 1984 are ex- pected; i.e., more questionnaires will be returned to faculty than the library. It is also expected that the response pattern for students who are aware of the new service configuration of the library will differ from the response pattern of the students who are not aware of the new services. The as- sumed direction of this effect will be that more questionnaires will be returned to the library than to the faculty. The change in library services available to the faculty was not of the same magni- tude as the services available to the M.B.A. students. Therefore, the hypothe- sis regarding faculty responses was: • H2: The pattern of responses for the fac- ulty in the current survey will not differ from the previous survey. In the 1984 survey, faculty returned twenty-six questionnaires to the library and thirty to faculty. This difference was not significant: p < .1. As mentioned previously, another con- sideration in the 1985 study is the poten- tial for sex bias between the authors. Therefore, the third hypothesis tested was: • H3: There will be no difference in return rate for students based on the sex of the addressee. As in the 1984 survey, .the question- naires were distributed one week before spring break. RESULTS For the 1985 survey, 243 students re- turned questionnaires. The response rate of about 20 percent was similar to that of the 1984 survey. A breakdown of returns by addressee is presented in table 1. No ar- rangement of returns was significant at p<.1. Therefore H3 is supported by the data. For this reason, sex is not considered a factor in the analysis of the principle re- TABLE 1 DISTRIBUTION OF STUDENT RETURNS BY TYPE OF ADDRESSEE Addressee Fre9uen9: Percent Female associate professor 63 25 .9 Female librarian 63 25 .9 Male associate professor 63 25.9 Male librarian 54 22.2 243 100.0 search hypothesis. Also, the sex of the respondent was not a factor. The proportion of male to female respondents was similar to the proportion of male to female M.B.A. students. There was no difference .in return rate between male researcher/male respondent or fe- male researcher/female respondent. An examination of student respondents based on whether they had searched at the library is presented in table 2. Based upon a chi-square test, the pattern of re- sponses · is different between the "searched" and "not searched" groups, TABLE2 DISTRIBUTION OF STUDENT RETURNSBYSEARCHEXPOSURE Addressee Librarian Professor Searched 79 69 148 p< .05. This supports H1. Not Searched 36 57 93 In addition, the pattern of responses from students who had not searched was Research Notes 393 not different between the 1984 and the current survey, p< .1; i.e., more question- naires were returned to faculty than to the library. Also, 83 percent of the students who had searched indicated that they were satisfied with the searching service provided by the library. Most of the com- ments from those not satisfied had to do with dissatisfaction with the time limita- tions placed upon student searching. A similar arrangement of experimental blocks was used for faculty. There were no significant differences in response rate by faculty based on sponsorship or sex of sponsor (table 3). In the 1985 survey, fac- ulty returned twenty-four questionnaires to faculty and twenty-three question- naires to the library. This result is not sig- nificantly different than the 1984 result at TABLE 3 DISTRIBUTION OF FACULTY RETURNS BY SEX AND AFFILIATION OF ADDRESSEE Sex of Affiliation Addressee Professor Librarian Total Female 11 13 24 Male 13 10 23 24 23 47 TABLE4 FACULTY RETURNS IN 1984 and 1985 BY AFFILIATION OF ADDRESSEE 1984 1985 Faculty 30 24 Library 26 23 p < .1. This result also supports H2 (table 4). DISCUSSION Pagell and Lusk suggested in the 1984 study that faculty sponsorship seemed likely to increase the response rate for M.B.A.'s.u Results of the present survey indicate that sponsorship alone does not determine response rate, suggesting there is an interactive effect between sponsor- ship of a survey and use of the services of the sponsoring organization. This may have implications for survey dissemination. In order to maximize re- turn rate, the source of sponsorship should be related to the user group that is 394 College & Research Libraries to be surveyed. For example, for M.B.A. students, eliciting fa<2ulty sponsorship should increase response rate for nonus- ers. If, on the other hand, the survey is be- ing designed to measure some characteris- tics of library usage, no faculty sponsorship is suggested. . Another implication from the interac- tion of library utilization and sponsorship is the issue of nonresponse bias. If a sur- vey is distributed to the entire client base, it would seem, from the results of this sur- vey, that users will be overrepresented, thereby possibly biasing the results of the survey. Using a more prestigiously per- ceived sponsor will increase the propor- tion of responses between users and non- users. If the faculty members themselves are the respondent group, sponsorship and service utilization do not appear, from the July 1986 results of either the 1984 or the present studies, to be survey design factors. The authors suggest that when distrib- uting a questionnaire, it is necessary to consider the patron group that is to be sur- veyed, i.e., users or nonusers, faculty or students, or a representative sample of the entire user population. In order to in- crease response rate and minimize nonre- sponse bias in a population survey, use of a more prestigious sponsor or joint spon- sorship by library and faculty might be considered. Awareness of the interactive effect of response rates and service use can also be valuable in designing a survey us- ing sampling methods such as stratified samples. The sample groups might be asked to respond to different sponsors. In settings like this one, where response rate tends to be low, any technique that will in- crease that rate is important to consider. REFERENCES 1. Anthony N . Doob, Jonathan Freedman, and J. Merrill Carlsrnith, "Effects of Sponsor and Prepay- ment on Compliance with a Mailed Request," Journal of Applied Psychology 57:346-47 Gune 1973) . 2. Robert A. Peterson, ''An Experimental Investigation of Mail-Survey Responses,'' Journal of Busi- ness Research 3:199-210 (July 1975). 3. Ibid., po207. 4. Wesley H. Jones and Gerald Linda, ''Multiple Criteria Effects in a Mail Survey Experiment,'' Jour- nal of Marketing Research 15:280-84 (May 1978) . 50 Wo Jack Duncan, "Mail Questionnaires in Survey Research: A Review of Response Inducement Techniques," Journal of Management 5:39-55 (Spring 1979). 6. Wesley H. Jones, "Generalizing Mail Survey Inducement Methods-Population Interactions with Anonymity and Sponsorship," Public Opinion Quarterly 43:102-11 (Spring 1979). 7 0 Christopher Scott, ''Research on Mail Surveys,'' Journal of the Royal Statistical Society-Series A, Part 2 124:143-91 (1969). 80 Seymour Sudrnan and Robert Ferber" A Comparison of Alternative Procedures for Collecting Consumer Expenditure Data for Frequently Purchased Products," Journal of Marketing Research 11:128-35 (1974) . 9. Nitecki, Danuta A., "Effects of Sponsorship and Nonmonetary Incentive on Response Rate," Journalism Quarterly 55:581-83 (Fall1978) . 10. Ruth A. Pagell and Edward J. Lusk, "An Experimental Design to Test Sponsorship and Dating Effects in Library Questionnaire Design," College & Research Libraries 45:493-95 (Nov . 1984) . 11. Michael Halperin and Ruth A. Pagell, "Free 'Do-It-Yourself' Online Searching .. 0 What to Ex- pect," Online 9:82-84 (Mar. 1985). 12. Pagell and Lusk, p.4940 ----~~1 ~I§'' 'Ja.-1~~--- READERS' GUIDE ABSTRACTS Now, reliable Readers' Guide to Periodical Liter?:Jture indexing is combined with informa- tive abstracts on typeset microfiche to make research faster and easier than ever before. READERS' GUIDE ABSTRACTS Offers • The same coverage as Readers' Guide- each of the more than 180 periodicals currently indexed . • Complete Readers' Guide indexing, including full cross-references. • High-quality abstracts for the articles indexed in Readers' Guide. • Currency- READERS' GUIDE ABSTRAUS is updated and cumulated approximately every six weeks. ' • Retrospective coverage beginning September 1984 is cumulated with recent material in every fiche set of Volume I (1986). Make Research Easier Than Ever Like all Wilson publications and services, READERS' GUIDE ABSTRAGS is designed to be easy for patrons to use and staff to maintain. 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