(a) Relevance & Research Question:
Social scientists are often reluctant to rely on data from online access panels or other web surveys because they fear that the general data quality may be seriously flawed and the results are thus neither valid nor reliable . The third major concern of representative sampling is not always important, e.g. in case of experimental designs or studies that are only used for analyzing relationships as opposed to comparing distributions and mean values. Our research question is, whether speeders in online surveys jeopardize results due to a lack of validity and reliability of results.
(b) Methods & Data:
In a research project on basic human values, fielded in 2010, we have implemented an online questionnaire and gathered data using the ‘Unipark’ online access panel. The 20 minute instrument includes among other measurements the 40 item Schwartz Portrait Value Questionnaire (PVQ) over five consecutive pages. We use confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) and structural equation models (SEM) to analyze our data.
(c) Results:
When analyzing the data we hardly faced any item non-response but have discovered many comparatively fast respondents using different speed thresholds. In order to cross-check our results we compared the results of CFA and SEM from two separate surveys (each: n > 750) using independent samples and we compare models from respondents at different speeds. We found a high degree of homogeneity between the two different samples and the models of slow respondents and speeders while controlling for straightliners on our Likert scale.
(d) Added Value:
The results indicate that value research may profit from online access panels both to pretest complex instruments and to validate results, e.g. by applying structural equation models. Although the quality of representative samples is not yet given for most online panels, the tentative results of our fundamental research indicates that speeders do not necessarily jeopardize the quality of the data and thus the validity and the reliability of results. This is an important insight for those social scientists usually relying on cost-intensive traditional PAPI and CATI data collection.