Web surveys potentially cost less to administer and are more convenient

for participants than either telephone or paper-based surveys, but concern

remains about the representativeness of the respondents to the population. This

research investigates the effectiveness of using Web-based survey methods by

comparing response rates and demographic characteristics of the telephonebased

and web-based survey respondents. The paper first reviews survey

research methodologies, including recent trends in web-based surveys that take

advantage of the power of modern computing and telecommunications

technology. The issue of respondent characteristics in web-based surveys is then

explored by comparing respondent demographics of an ongoing telephone

survey to those of a subsequent Web survey of the same population. Exploratory

and confirmatory statistical analyses are used to triangulate the findings and test

the hypotheses. The data suggests that demographics of the respondents of

the two methods are similar across race and age, but differ significantly across