Exploring Factors Affecting Online Survey Response Rates among Nigerian Management Graduate Students: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

This study investigates why Nigerian management graduate students often show low participation in online surveys, focusing on practical digital constraints and issues of trust. Using a qualitative design, we conducted online, semi-structured interviews with 18
postgraduate management students from Nigerian universities and analyzed the data using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings show that high data costs, unstable internet connectivity, and limited device capacity discourage participation, while perceptions of researcher professionalism, clarity of consent and privacy information, and sensitivity of survey topics strongly shape willingness to respond. Participants also highlighted survey fatigue, especially when links are widely broadcast in bulk through messaging platforms, and expressed a preference for academically meaningful incentives, such as summaries of findings,
over vague prize-based rewards. The study contributes to the literature by demonstrating how material digital constraints and context-specific trust concerns interact to depress online survey response rates in a resource-constrained setting, and it offers practical recommendations for designing more trustworthy, low-burden online surveys for management research in Nigeria.