Why Are We Giving Gifts?

This post is exclusively for students of BITS Pilani who have been requested to participate in a survey being conducted from 19 Feb 2015 to 4 Mar 2015.

I am sure that many prospective respondents of the survey are thinking why will they get gifts for participating in a survey. Many may also question the authenticity of the claim that so much amount will be actually given away for taking part in a survey. This post is specially dedicated to answer these questions!

The survey for which gifts are given is for a PhD research work of a member of the team. When social scientists conduct surveys, they have to decide on the population of interest in order to investigate some phenomenon. In this case, the research team had two options: (1) choose students from premium institutes of India or (2) choose students from BITS Pilani only.

Taking students from different premium institutes might give better results, but that would add to logistic issues, besides increasing the expenditure. Moreover, BITSians themselves form a mini India within the campus because of their native places and socio-economic background. So, by choosing BITSians the aforementioned two issues were minimized to a great extent.

We know that sitting for around 20-25 minutes and filling a long questionnaire may seem to be very boring, especially when you are at your young age. Therefore, to motivate students to fill the form properly, money saved by not going to other institutes is distributed among the participants of the survey,

We are expecting around 600 respondents from BITS Pilani. Approximately Rs. 15000 has been kept as the budget for this survey, at this moment. There is a high likelihood of it being increased if we find more enthusiastic student participants. In effect, a win-win situation has been created, where a student spends some time to fill up the survey sincerely helping the research team save time and overcome logistic issues, while the respondent students win up to Rs. 2000 as gift. And everybody is assured of at least a small gift at the survey spot itself. If all gifts are not exhausted during the duration of the survey at BITS Pilani, in spite of reaching the required sample size, then the remaining gifts will be given at random to the participants.

But there is one word of caution here. If the response from BITS Pilani is not as expected, then the survey team will have no other option, but to look for participants from other premium institutes. Hence, the funding for the gifts will also be diverted to those institutes. So, if you have already participated in the survey, then tell your other friends also to take part in it, in order to increase your probability of winning more gifts.

The survey team is issuing gift vouchers from Amazon or Flipkart, as preferred by the lucky winners. These gift vouchers are fully redeemable against any purchase from these online stores. There are no other terms and conditions applicable on the use of these vouchers.

So, dear BITSians, rush to participate in the survey (Syndicate Room # 6069, Dept of Management, New Academic Block). It is open till 4 March 2015 (10 AM - 1 PM ; 3 PM - 6 PM ; 7 PM - 9 PM).

You may also participate in the survey by filling the questionnaire online from the comfort of your own place. Please visit http://www.tinyurl.com/bits-osm-survey . This survey will continue till 31 March 2015. There are gifts for referrals too!