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Web Survey Bibliography

Title Does the Use of Smartphones to Participate in Web Surveys Affect the Survey Experience when Sensitive Questions are Proposed?
Source General Research Conference (GOR) 2016
Year 2016
Access date 16.08.2016
Presentation PDF (378 KB)
Abstract
Relevance & Research Question: Survey methodologists recently started dealing with a rapid change observed in the web survey participation: the spread of mobile devices and of the mobile web usage made the mobile participation more and more common. This causes the rise of new methodological questions concerning, for example, the comparability of collected data. In fact, the different characteristics of mobile devices (reduced size of the screens, high portability, etc.) and the potentially different contexts of participation (wider range of places, presence of bystanders) can significantly affect the survey experience and, consequently, how the information is reported. This papers aims at understanding if the use of smartphones and the use of a questionnaire optimized for mobile participation can significantly affect respondents' survey experience, when sensitive questions are proposed.
Methods & Data: Our experiment was implemented in Spain at the beginning of 2015 by the online opt-in panel Netquest. It involved 1,800 panelists who were randomly assigned to PC, smartphone non-optimized or smartphone optimized, in two waves. This allows evaluating the device and the optimization effects for the same respondents.
Results: Our results confirm previous literature findings about the participation place (the preferred is “home”). Nevertheless, the survey context for smartphones respondents can be very different because of the higher variety of places and the more common presence of bystanders. Nevertheless the use of smartphones does not play a role in determining the survey experience measured by the following aspects: the trust in the survey confidentiality, the perceived sensitivity of the questions, the feeling uneasy during the survey. Nevertheless, with a smartphone it is more probable being distracted by other tasks. The role of the questionnaire optimization is also not significant.
Added Value: Our results provide new findings about the survey experience for PC and smartphone respondents in a country not studied before: Spain. The web survey participation by means of smartphones can be very different from the classic PC-based survey participation. Nonetheless, even if sensitive questions are proposed, the respondents are not influenced by the used device or by the different context and the survey experience is not affected. 
Year of publication2016
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
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Web survey bibliography (4081)

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