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

Web Survey Bibliography

Title Bees to Honey or Flies to Manure? How the Usual Subject Recruitment Exacerbates the Shortcomings of Non-probability Samples
Year 2016
Access date 25.05.2016
Abstract Among the criticisms of online panels is their use of nonrandom recruitment and repeated interviewing of a subject pool. A growing literature has started to examine the data quality implications of so-called “professional" respondents—heavy survey takers thought to seek out surveys for the cash and incentives offered. While this literature has reached inconsistent conclusions about satisficing behavior among experienced survey takers, our previous examination of political outcomes by survey experience found professional respondents were less politically interested, engaged, and knowledgeable than other respondents. The observed patterns suggested countervailing biases associated with selfselection, with professional survey-takers motivated by incentives and nonprofessional survey-takers motivated by interest in the survey topic. The proposed experiment will build on this previous work by explicitly evaluating the impact of respondent’s survey taking experience and motivation for participation on survey estimates. We employ a two-by-two experimental framework, in which we manipulate the description and advertised topic of the survey and the financial compensation offered to participants; implemented with two different online panels. We compare respondents across these four conditions in terms of their demographic profiles, political attitudes, and respondent quality, as well as their experience taking surveys and panel tenure. The proposed analysis will bridge and contribute to both the recent literature on professional respondents and the classic literature examining the consequences of interest in survey topic. 
Year of publication2016
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
Print

Web survey bibliography (4086)

Page:
Page: