Incentive Justification

Attachment G: Incentive Justification

Determining Payments to Participants

The cost of participant acquisition includes two main components, the cost of recruitment and the incentive. The cost of recruitment is for the time it takes to secure qualified participants for each focus group. The incentive is the payment given to participants as a token of appreciation for their time and involvement with the project. The incentive amount of $25 per participant is impacted by a number of variables for this project, including the following:

• Burden on respondent/total participation time of 1 hour: length of time for viewing the material (30 minutes) plus the length of time to respond to the survey (15 minutes each iteration for two distinct times, before and after the training).

• Encourage participation: Participants will receive a total of $25. The total time burden for each respondent is 1 hour. The incentive schedule is consistent with the average salary for construction workers in Washington DC which is $23 an hour according to the BLS (http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_47894.htm#47-0000).

• Past experience: The completion rate for OMB # 0920-0936 was 96% using the same rate of $25 per hour for survey respondents. In the current project, we hope to achieve a similar completion rate using the same rate of $25 per response hour.

Cash or checks are neutral (not connected with a company, service or product) and have universal utility. It is usually more cost-effective and efficient to offer a monetary incentive perceived as attractive by the participant, as this mitigates the recruitment costs. Incentives are given to each actual participant and not to those who do not attend the group.

The incentive serves as a tangible thank you to participants for their time and engagement in the project. The amounts need to be high enough that participants feel like it is worth their time to participate and cannot be so low that participants perceive their time and candid responses are under-valued. Likewise, incentives cannot be so high that participants become skeptical. Recruiters know from experience what immigrant workers expect to receive. Immigrant workers have traditionally been difficult to recruit and maintain enrolled over the course of the study. The amount of $25 was recommended by the contractor responsible for recruiting the participants. Recruiters have no monetary incentive to recommend a payment to participants other than what their experience dictates the market requires, because the payment to participants is just that. The full amount goes to the participants. The recruiter is paid for the time they expect it to take to recruit qualified participants (i.e., participants who meet the research criteria). In our experience, it is most cost effective to pay the recruiter-recommended incentive, as this results in better completion rates and lower recruiting costs.

To incentivize this population to participate, we are offering a cash amount consistent with the average salary for a construction worker in the Washington DC area to offset any potential lost time and associated wages. The $25 incentive (for total burden of 1 hour) we would like to use in this project is comparable to the average hourly wage of construction workers in the Washington DC area ($23/hr) that we need to recruit for this project (http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_47894.htm#47-0000).