I’ve just come back from Germany and the General Online Research Conference where I presented some research that Mick Couper (ISR) and I did on some very basic Web survey design features: screen size, background color, and placement of the navigation buttons. More on that later. For now I simply want to draw attention to the fact that much of the really interesting research on Web survey design is being done in Europe, in both the academic and commercial sectors. GOR is a prime example. You can view the program here: http://www.gor.de/gor07/index_en.php . Originally founded as a German conference it is rapidly become pan-European. They now require that all slides be in English and roughly three quarters of the papers this time around were presented in English. Pretty much every European country was represented along with a dozen or so Americans including truly.
While AAPOR has finally jumped on the Web bandwagon here in the US it has been a late starter, and the quality of research being presented there, while improving, is mostly not up to the European standard. I think there are at least two reasons. First, there simply is not as much methodological research done in the US commercial sector as there is in Europe. We tend to "just do it." European MR types tend to have a stronger academic orientation than their US counterparts. Second, US academics have been slow to become interested in Web surveys because the sampling problem is so daunting. They have tended to write it off as "unscientific" because the bulk of the research to date has been with non-probability samples, a.k.a Web panels. Fortunately, this has begun to change and I think that over the next few years we will see a lot of interesting stuff at places like AAPOR.