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Web Survey Bibliography

Title "What the h... are they doing?" - What are respondents doing while filling in an online-questionnaire.
Year 2004
Access date 10.06.2004
Abstract A very often discussed disadvantage in online studies is the unknown setting. Does the respondant sit alone in front of the screen or in a group while participating? Are there other activities which do interupt the process of filling in? Have the selected choices changed? All this could affect data-quality and therefore the validity of gathered data. In a study with the subject "acceptance and attitude about interviews which are carried out through instant messaging (IM) programms" all the useractions where reported with javascript. The respondands were recruited among different channels like Web-portals, Banner-ads, IRC-chatrooms, ICQ, Web-searchmachines and Newsgroups. Besides the position of the mousepointer, clicks, doubleclicks, textinput, an so on were also logged. This all was happening non-reactive. Hence intentional manipulation of data wasn't a problem. The additionaly collected data were transfered together with the data of the questionnaire but stored separately. Through this path of timestamped actions it was possible to spot longer inactivity or changes in selected choices for example. In fact it would be possible to reproduce the whole process of filling in the questionnaire in almost realtime. Due to the bulk of data and complexity of task a full analysis wasn't able (yet).
Access/Direct link Homepage - conference (abstract)
Year of publication2004
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
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Web survey bibliography (4086)

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