Category: Web Surveys
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Words trump pictures in Web surveys
Mick Couper really likes pictures. He not only takes a lot of them he also has had an ongoing interest in how incorporating pictures into Web surveys affects how people answer questions. Way back in 2004 he and his colleagues showed that the frequency with which respondents reported certain types of events (shopping, going to…
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Let’s focus on the third leg
Kristin Luck writes a column for RBR and for two issues in a row she's worked the worry beads about what she sees as declining interest in online panel data quality. In the current column Kristin draws heavily on a reaction to her first column by Jackie Lorch. Jackie summarizes two legs of the online…
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Some things we should already know
Earlier in the week Jeffrey Henning (IMHO the best of the MR bloggers) served up a much-praised and frequently retweeted post on why respondents abandon Web surveys. His post does what most of the respondent engagement debate does not do and that is get down to some basic facts about what it is in surveys…
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Let’s get on with it
I spent some time over the weekend putting the finishing touches on a presentation for later this week in Washington at a workshop being put on by the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council. The workshop is part of a larger effort to develop a new agenda for research into social science…
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A good idea but . . .
The empty threat of a major blizzard (forecast of up to 15" of snow with an actual snowfall of 5") here in Ann Arbor presented a nice excuse to stay home and catch up on some reading. The December issue of the Journal of Official Statistics was on the list and I was happy to…
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Six of one . . .
We do a large amount of survey work with physicians and virtually all of it relies on online panels. Not that long ago we had a client who insisted on our using mail to recruit physicians to Web surveys, partially on the premise that it would produce a more representative sample. That client has since…
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For those mobile users sneaking into Web surveys
AAPOR's online journal Survey Practice continues to be one of my favorite places to go for quick updates on the latest methodological research. To wit, the December issue has a nice little piece by Mario Callegaro on mobile users who perhaps unexpectedly show up to take an online survey designed for administration via a laptop…
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KISS
One of the links in the blog roll down on the right is to Jakob Nielsen's site, usit.com. Nielsen does a steady stream of Web usability research and has published a number of excellent books on the topic. It's always interesting to look at his work and see what lessons there might be in it…
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Let’s ban the R word
While working on a paper over the weekend it suddenly hit me that "necessary but not sufficient" is the perfect way to describe the whole array of techniques that have emerged over the last few years in the name of improving panel data quality. Not to be confused with the Goldratt "business novel" (now there's…
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Balancing risk and reward in survey incentives
The current issue of Survey Practice has an interesting little piece on the use of lottery incentives in online surveys. (Here I quickly point out that the correct terminology should be "sweepstakes" since there are legal issues around anyone but governmental entities running lotteries, but let's not get distracted by that.) In self-administered surveys like…