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Web Survey Bibliography

Title Push2web or less is more? Experimental evidence from a mixed-mode population survey at the community level in Germany
Year 2017
Access date 08.09.2017
Abstract The ‘Tailored design’ method (Dillmann et al. 2014) does not just seek to improve response rates, but also to alleviate the resulting non-response bias. Offering a tailored response option for respondents also provides the additional benefit of a substantial reduction of survey costs, considering the cost differential between an online and a paper responses. Yet, offering the web option implicitly relies on the assumption of equal and complete access to the internet and corresponding skill sets among respondents. Millar & Dillman (2014), who “conducted two experiments within a population that has complete access to the Internet and is believed to be highly Web literate” (Millar & Dillman 2014: 2) therefore covered only a (still) special case and found that offering both response option may not be a first best choice to achieve higher response rates. Do these results hold for samples of the general population as well? 
To gain insights on this question, we systematically varied the postal recruitment process of a large mixed-mode survey we conducted in the fall of 2016 in the federal state of Saxony in Germany. We applied a sequential design similar to Millar & Dillman (2014) for the invitation of 8000 citizens to a community survey on waste disposal and environmental behavior. In the first invitation wave, we randomly allocated 40% of the respondents to paper-only survey, another 20% to a web-only and the final 40% to mixed-mode design with both response options. The follow-up consisted of a ‘Thank You’-postcard after about two weeks and a second invitation wave (completely) in mixed-mode design, offering both response options. We will present results of the competing designs on the overall response as well as a non-response analysis, based on register characteristics. 
Year of publication2017
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
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Web survey bibliography (4086)

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