Gamification of Online Surveys for Public Health Data Collection

Standard survey methods have many issues associated with them, especially when they contain a large number of questions, or take a long time to complete. These problems come in the form of user fatigue, a lack of interest in the survey, or inaccurate and incomplete answers. We hypothesized that the use of badging - a self element of gamification - would increase completion rates, increase time spent on the survey, and have no effect on straight-lining behaviour. This research describes the specific tools that have been developed to investigate the use of Gamification (specifically badging) and answer these hypotheses. Results indicated that badging had no effect on completion rates, although this could be an artifact of participant selection bias. However, the study does suggest that gamification, specifically badging, increases the time a user spends on the survey.