I. Objectives or purposes

Using data to make policy decision for higher education is a trend. But the issue is that how to collect high-quality data. For survey, response rate is one of indicators of representative data. However, increasing response rate must contact with survey subjects with lots of expensive inputs.

In order to obtain more empirical data of higher education for implementing policies, the government in Taiwan funded our institution, Center for Educational Research and Evaluation at National Taiwan Normal University, to conduct the national surveys such as freshman survey, junior student survey, graduate survey (exit survey), one-year follow up survey, three-year follow up survey, and so on.  

Based on our experience and social theories, we designed network-based recommendation game to encourage target subjects to inform others to fill out the web questionnaire for improving response rate and decreasing expensive costs. The experimental results showed well. In this paper, we will share the findings and experience with European scholars in ECER 2014.

II. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework

Although web survey is more convenient and economical, for survey subjects, they sometimes feel unsafe. They are worried about the issue of private information security, they are reluctant to offer their personal information, and they cannot trust the unknown survey center.

Therefore, based on social network theories and social capital theories, we designed recommendation game integrated into web survey to increase the trust, obligation, and information sharing.

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