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Web Survey Bibliography

Title ‘Low social presence’ in web surveys: advantage or disadvantage or both? An experiment
Year 2006
Access date 24.09.2006
Abstract For online researchers the achievable quality of data from web surveys is still an important question. Prejudices and doubts concerning the usefulness of this ‘new’ survey method are still widely spread. Besides the problems of representativeness potential mode effects may reduce the data quality. Particularly, the method ‘web survey’ is characterized by a low social presence (Short / Williams / Christie 1976), as a consequence of the absence of an interviewer. On the one hand this can be an advantage, mainly because it causes a lower effect of social desirability and a higher self-disclosure of respondents. On the other hand one has to doubt about negative effects precisely because of this anonymous situation. According to the ‚Social Cues Filtered Out Hypotheses’ of Kiesler & Sproull (1986) the situational lack of social cues influences a lot of psychological processes. Thus it can be presumed that this low social presence leads to a lower normative influence on the respondent. This could produce a distorted ‘verbal behaviour’ in web surveys, contrary to more personal communication modes. In particular, problems may occur in socially orientated surveys and surveys based on individual aspects like ethical values. Because systematic errors may be caused further research is needed. Based on these hypotheses we implemented an experiment with 600 subjects. They answered the same questionnaire twice – with an interval of five weeks – using different survey modes (web, postal and telephone). The above mentioned critical subject areas were asked. This enabled us to compare the collected data systematically with the Multitrait-Multimethod-Matrix (Campbell & Fiske 1959) to identify negative mode effects. The results will be presented.
Access/Direct link Conference homepage (abstract)
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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