Empirical Study on Improving Entrepreneurial Business Research Quality: Motivating and Involving Entrepreneurial Business Owner Respondents to Voluntarily Engage in Responding to Mail Surveys

Abstract

Most researchers agree on the importance of evolvement of entrepreneurship due to its huge impact on national economy and the well-being of the society. Thus, the importance of studying the trends and phenomena in the world of entrepreneurial community is gaining much attention. However, small business owners are notorious among business researchers for having very low response rates, creating the potential for substantial error in surveys of this population and diminishing the credibility of research conducted on small firms. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of respondent's involvement in sweepstakes on response rate of mail surveys for entrepreneurial owners and executives. The test results show that respondent involvement in sweepstakes significantly improves response rate, thus producing lower non-response error. Involvement is also found to reduce the response error.