CentERdata strives since many years to get online interviews accepted for academic research. With the help of subsidies from NWO (the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research), CentERdata intends to give this an extra impulse in the coming years by setting up a new panel composed of 5,000 Dutch households. This new panel will be a laboratory for developing and testing new, innovative research techniques, which is freely accessible for academic researchers and geared towards fundamental longitudinal research. The project will specifically concentrate on integrating various fields of study, such as economics, social sciences, (bio)medical science and behavioural science.
The project uses a traditional probability sample, drawn in co-operation with CBS (Statistics Netherlands), which also includes households and individuals who do not use the Internet or have a computer. CentERdata will loan these respondents equipment and give them Internet access. We will also pay extra attention to groups that often fall outside the scope of web-surveys, such as the elderly or immigrants.