A COMPARISON OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF MAIL AND FACSIMILE AS SURVEY MEDIA ON RESPONSE RATE, SPEED AND QUALITY

This study attempts to compare the effectiveness of fax as a survey medium with mail in terms of response rate, speed and quality. A short questionnaire with eight easy-to-answer questions was used as the survey instrument and was faxed/sent to 620 managers. One hundred usable questionnaires were collected representing a response rate of about 16%, which is considered satisfactory for similar studies conducting in Hong Kong. A follow-up survey of non-respondents indicated that the reasons for not responding were not related to the subject matter of the research; thus the validity of the findings in this research was not threatened. The results indicate that mail questionnaires attached with self-addressed stamped return envelopes produced the highest response rate over fax and ordinary mail questionnaires whereas fax generated the best response speed. Response quality on the two media does not indicate any significant difference.