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Web Survey Bibliography

Title Online Survey Response Patterns
Year 2006
Access date 23.09.2006
Abstract Authors have considered issues such as the impact of contact type on web survey response rates (Porter, 2003) and the effect of personalisation on response rates (Heerwegh et al, 2003). Extending such work this talk reports our experience and findings from designing, developing and managing an online survey management tool at Nottingham Trent University, England. This is used for academic rather than market research surveys, mostly within our social science academic department. Our findings are based on metadata extracted from the question and response databases, and also questioning survey authors post-project. Our custom written tool has been in use since 1997 and has grown in popularity. It is currently used for a range of teaching, admin and research purposes. To help researchers we have developed a dataset from around 250 surveys. We can discern patterns and relationships, for example the relationship between numbers of questions and response rates. Some relationships are surprising, for instance, our very longest surveys have the highest response rates. The reasons for this relate to other factors such as the status and scope of the research. Cobanoglu (2001) reported the faster response times of web surveys. We have data which describes the time spread of responses after publication, so we can see how factors such as population demographics and recruitment methods affect the distribution of responses over the lifetime of a survey project. It is possible to see which kinds of topics or populations produce better response rates. Other factors which can be related to response rates include the proportion of open text questions and closed responses. By isolating a small number of successful surveys and investigating them in depth we can identify factors such as “captive audiences” and “perceived status of the research” as possible predictors of success. We continue to develop our survey software and plan to collect more sophisticated metadata with far more detailed analysis of web surveys and their responses. Cobanoglu, C., “A Comparison of Mail, Fax and Web-based Survey Methods”, International Journal of Market Research, 2001 Quarter 4, Vol. 43 Issue 4, pp441-452 Heerwegh, D., Vanhove, T., Matthijs, K., Loosveldt, G., “The Effect of Personalisation Rates on Data Quality in Web Surveys”, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp 85-99 Porter, S. R., “The impact of Contact Type on Web Survey Response Rates”, Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter 2003, Vol. 67 Issue 4, pp579-588
Year of publication2006
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
Full text availabilityNon-existant
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Web survey bibliography - 2006 (98)

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