This inquiry was conducted to examine influences on perceptions of survey subjects regarding ideographic characteristics of the subjects, incentives to enhance mail returns, and multiple requests for information. A mail survey sent to 297 former education students from a large university produced responses from 48.3% of the sample. The ideographic characteristics considered were date of graduation and level of work experience; the incentives considered were receipt of a newsletter and/or receipt of 25 cents mailed with the survey. Analysis of returns showed: (1) sampling former students across level of teaching experience and year of graduation did not result in a response bias to an instrument seeking perceptions on topics of general professional interest to teachers; (2) using incentives did not introduce a response bias; (3) receipt of a university newsletter did produce a higher response ratio, but receipt of a small monetary incentive (25 cents) did not; and (4) using multiple mailouts to increase the number of responses did not affect response patterns across mailout requests. (Author/JGL)