The National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) is organising an afternoon symposium 'Web surveys of the general population' at the Royal Statistical Society on 5 June 2014, at 2-5pm.
Abstract
As ever greater numbers of face-to-face services move to the web delivery, survey funders increasingly ask whether the same transition can be achieved for surveys. Conducting surveys online should, in principle at least, bring substantial cost efficiencies as well as enabling surveys to be undertaken in new, faster and more innovative ways. To a large extent this move to an online survey environment has already taken place, with a huge volume of commercial polling now carried out via ‘opt-in’ online panels.
However, there remains a high degree of uncertainty about whether this type of sample design is capable of providing estimates of sufficiently high quality for the purposes of academic research and the production of official statistics. Concerns centre around the non-random nature of sample recruitment, as well as the deleterious effects of incentive payments and repeated interviewing on measurement quality. Attempts to interview random samples of the general population online are hampered by a lack of suitable sampling frames and a substantial minority of citizens still having no access to the internet. This symposium comprises presentations from leading international scholars on the current state-of-art in surveying the general population online.
Speakers:
- Chair, Patrick Sturgis, National Centre for Research Methods, University of Southampton
- Using the web to survey the UK general population: conclusions from the GenPopWeb network, Gerry Nicolaas, NatCen Social Research, London
- Feasibility of Using the Web to Survey the UK General Population: an Experiment from the European Social Survey, Ann Villar, Centre for Comparative Social Surveys, City University, London
- Taking an existing face-to-face panel survey online: methodological challenges, Peter Lynn, Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex
- Lessons Learned from Creating Probability Sample Online Panels in the U.S., Jon Krosnick, Stanford University
This event is free, but you need to register as places are limited.