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Web Survey Bibliography

Title A Systematic Generation of an Email Pool for Web Surveys
Year 2015
Access date 02.07.2015
Abstract

A constantly increasing amount of researchers are deciding to conduct online surveys. In terms of data quality, the data obtained by web surveys have been found to be of poorer quality than the data collected through other modes of data collection such as telephone and face to face surveys. The main critique of online surveys refers to the non-probability sampling methods in use. Whereas, it is comparably easy to draw random population samples based on the random generation of telephone numbers, online surveys are lacking this ability so far. Therefore, our research explores a new way of systematically generating a pool of e-mail addresses for online surveys. To this end, we applied a name based approach which is usually used in telephone survey research. In particular, we generated all possible combinations of the twenty-five most common German surnames, first names, and different e-mail providers. As a result, we produced a large pool of more than 400,000 e-mail addresses from which we could draw a random sample. To compare the results, we conducted the same survey among two samples from different online access panels and a student sample with the identical questionnaires and equivalent field times. All together, we are able compare four online surveys (N=100-300). This enables us to investigate a variety of aspects of data quality such as non-response, drop -outs and response time. Strikingly, the data obtained by our new sampling method performed well in all aspects of data quality and we would like to suggest it as a new possibility for online researchers to contact fresh respondents and ensure a wide spread among internet users.

BibliographyData collection
Year of publication2015
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
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Web survey bibliography (4086)

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