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I have an inquiry for the expert researchers out there: 

I'm involved in a project where we're collecting data with 350 or so employees of a municipal government.  We're aiming for our questionnaire to take 30-45 minutes to complete, with mostly Likert/multiple-choice but a handful of open-ended questions.  My sense is that this is a long time to keep people's attention for filling out the instrument on their own, and because we want to maximize our response rate we've ruled out a (snail)mail-back process.

Instead, we were planning to herd people into a conference room and give the survey in groups.  This will allow us to have more control over the context and to keep their undivided attention.  However, the employees are divided among several sites, which makes logistics for group survey admin complicated.  Additional challenges are that people would have to take time from work to come to the sessions and some departments would need to send people in shifts so service isn't interrupted.  (And we don't even know yet if there'll be issues with the union about asking some staff to leave their work sites!)  

So a web-based process is another possibility, assuming all employees have access to and ability to use a computer.  The plus is that we could track and follow-up with non-responders to push up the response rate, and we could do a limited run of a mail-back paper-based version for people who aren't online.  However, there are still the same risks of their filling out the instrument at their work station -- interruptions, colleagues looking over their shoulder or discussing answers, etc.  

I'd be interested to hear about your experience and solutions to this conundrum!  Also, I'd appreciate input on this question re: considerations specific to municipal government contexts or on other potential threats to validity for either option.

Thanks,

Max Freund