AN INVESTIGATION OF THE EFFECTS OF THREE FACTORS ON RESPONSE TO MAIL QUESTIONNAIRES

While conducting a survey of former Fulbright and Smith-Mundt grantees,' we investigated the effects of three factors on questionnaire response frequencies: the class of mailing (half the questionnaires were sent by first-class mail, half by third-class mail); the color of the questionnaire (half were printed on green paper, half on white); and the type of postage on the return envelope (half the envelopes were business reply, half had stamps pasted on them). Using a 2 by 2 by 2 factorial design, we randomly divided our sample into eight treatment groups, each of which received a different combination of the levels of the three factors.