Notice: the WebSM website has not been updated since the beginning of 2018.

Web Survey Bibliography

Title Return To Sender: An Evaluation of Undeliverable (e)Mail in the Modern Age
Year 2015
Access date 02.07.2015
Abstract

Internet surveys are becoming increasingly popular, yet response rates continue to remain low for the majority of studies. For many studies, response rates and participation rates may be impacted by addresses that are undeliverable. Emails may be returned to the sender for a variety of reasons - inaccurate address, full inbox, or technological failures. These bounce backs are likely to be missing completely at random. It is also common for email providers to block email or divert bulk messages to SPAM boxes. When a provider blocks all respondents from receiving the email, it is hypothesized that these respondents are not missing at random from the sample frame. The current study utilizes data from the Gallup Panel, a probability-based, multimode panel with over 50,000 members who respond to surveys via the internet. Email address and demographics are known for all panel members. The eight largest email domains in the panel, each representing at least 2% of all panel members, were analyzed to explore the demographic profile of each email domain. Significant demographic differences were found between domains, with some domains more likely to include younger, male, minority, and lower educated respondents. The study also explored the substantive results of five panel studies. Respondents from each domain were individually excluded from the results to create sets of hypothetical datasets that simulated an exclusion or block for each domain. Each study had eight sets of analysis, for a total of 40 simulated datasets, that covered a wide variety of topics. Despite the demographic differences, few questions had meaningfully different results when an entire domain was excluded.

Year of publication2015
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
Print

Web survey bibliography - The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) 70th Annual Conference, 2015 (35)