For years, the Internet has intrigued survey researchers for its potential to overcome historic obstacles associated with self-administered (SAQ), paper-and-pencil (PAPI) surveys. Losing surveys in the mail and costly reliance on data entry programming, training, and staffing are two key hurdles that all SAQ, PAPI surveys encounter. The challenge, then, is to use this technology in a way that is scientifically rigorous and employs the best features of the Internet, namely the inherent democratic nature of the tool, improved sample monitoring capabilities, the relative ease of data transmission, minimal case costs, and improved data quality. The most daunting of all the challenges that Internet surveys face is achieving high response rates.
In 2002, NORC launched a web-based survey of over 9,000 minority students who received scholarships to attend the colleges or universities of their choice. This was the base year of a five-year longitudinal survey designed to measure the life outcomes of the scholarship recipients and a sample of scholarship non-recipients. The study will track the students over the next five years and gather information related to their college experiences, civic engagement and professional lives.
This paper will show that it is possible to launch a large-scale, web-based survey of post-secondary students that garners high response by using the Dillman Method. The paper will review NORC’s history of launching web surveys and provide information from other web surveys to contextualize NORC’s specific experience on the scholarship study. The paper will then go on to present response rates, respondent contact methods and special treatments used during data collection to boost response rates. Through this, we hope to sketch a framework for successfully implementing large-scale, web-based surveys and achieving high response rates with student populations.