About six months ago we had a client do some major hand wringing about bad behavior by Web panelists. She had been to some sort of session by people from the Burke Institute who had convinced her that Web panels were full of people misrepresenting themselves to qualify for surveys and then once in clicking through mindlessly to get the incentive. She came armed with some Burke-inspired ideas for identifying these people so we could delete their survey data prior to analysis. I responded with an eloquent and convincing defense of Web panel quality. Sure there are some bad apples, but not enough to worry about if you are sure to be working with a quality panel company.
Now I’ve joined with a friend and his colleague to write a paper on this very topic, citing even worse behaviors than what the client brought to us,and advocating even more extreme measures to root out these scoundrels. I have posted the paper here: http://www.marketstrategies.com/rbdocs/Downes-LeGuinMechlingBaker.pdf . I’m just glad that I had the good sense not to blog on the topic at the time. At least I don’t think I did. In general, the problem is worse than I thought but not so bad as I feared. And dealing with it is fairly straightforward. Read the paper.