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Web Survey Bibliography

Title How Do Different Sampling Techniques Perform in a Web-Only Survey? Results From a Comparison of a Random Sample Email Blast to an Address-Based Sampling Approach
Year 2013
Access date 29.05.2013
Abstract

In the late 1990s there was much optimism that the Web-based surveys would become the replacement for RDD telephone interviews. For many reasons, Web only surveys have not taken precedence among different survey modes. For one, according to the 2010 Current Population Survey, about 72% of the American households have Internet access. Among these households, some individuals lack the skills to use it, are uncomfortable with it, or use it infrequently. Still, among certain segments of the population, Web-surveying has become a viable part of the lexicon of survey research. As a result, more research is necessary to understand ways to sample for Web-only surveys and examine the implications of different sampling strategies on survey estimates. In this paper, we compare two Internet sampling strategies for a Web-only survey to assess the data quality and cost-efficiency obtained via each sampling strategy. In the first sampling approach, email addresses were randomly selected from a vendor’s email address sample frame. We sent the sampled email addresses a series of survey invitation emails which included the link to our survey. The second sampling strategy employed an Address Based Sampling (ABS) approach and sampled addresses from the USPS Delivery Sequence File. We sent the sampled addresses a series of survey invitation mailings which included the link to our survey, as well as the instructions on how to complete the survey. We compare respondent demographics and response distributions by sampling approach and ultimately compare the response distributions obtained via each sampling approach to a national-level benchmark (e.g. General Social Survey) to assess generalizability. In addition, we explore the results of these approaches in terms of response rates, the effectiveness of incentives, and the comparison of weighted response distributions.

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Year of publication2013
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
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