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Internet Surveys

Internet surveys refer to surveys that sample respondents via the Internet, gather data from respondents via the Internet, or both. Using the Internet to conduct survey research provides a great many opportunities and a great many challenges to researchers.

Background and Overview

Sample surveys have developed considerably over the past 70 years and have become the major source for the vast majority of empirical data, available today, on society, opinions, economics, and consumer preferences. Until the 1970s almost all survey work was carried out by pencil-and-paper questionnaires. Most of the collection was by means of face-to-face personal interview visits at the respondents' home or business. A small part of survey collection was by self-administered questionnaires, sometimes delivered and collected by interviewers and sometimes collected via mail. In recent times electronic telecommunications have become a predominant factor in practically all aspects of modern life, especially since the beginning of the 21st century. Sample surveys are no exception, and the widespread use of the telephone as a prime mode of communication, for at least the past 40 years, has had an important influence on survey practice. In fact, the telephone survey has become the major mode of collection in the sample survey field, especially in North America and Western Europe, both for surveys of households and individuals and for surveys of establishments. Other modes of advanced telecommunication, such as Internet, email, videophone, fax, and mobile phones, are fast becoming important supplements and even competitors to the fixed line telephone.

Internet surveys, sometimes termed Web surveys or WWW surveys, have fast become an important component of the trend to replace face-to-face interviewing, as the main mode of collection in survey work, with telesurveys—surveys carried out by modern telecommunication methods. The growing widespread access to the Internet and its extended use for a variety of purposes, particularly in Western Europe and North America, together with the rapid technological development of advanced browsers, XML, ADSL, and Java technology have brought about the continually increasing massive use of the Internet for survey work. The Internet survey can be viewed as a considerably enhanced replacement of the email survey, where text questionnaires are emailed to respondents, who are then asked to return the completed questionnaire by email. However, the Internet survey overcomes many of the inherent limitations of email surveys. The possibilities of visual and audio stimulation, the online interactive capabilities, and the potential of enhanced skip patterns available in the design of an Internet survey make it an extremely powerful survey data collection tool, far superior to the email survey. On the other hand the Internet survey may often suffer from serious problems of coverage, representativeness, and nonresponse bias.

Advantages

The major advantage of the use of the Internet in data collection is the very low cost per respondent, as compared to other modes of data collection. This has made the Internet survey an extremely attractive option to a wide range of survey researchers, primarily in the areas of opinion polling and market research, where the principles of probability sampling are not always considered as being of prime importance and large numbers of respondents are judged as valuable. The initial set-up costs entailed in the design of high-quality collection instruments via the Internet may be somewhat higher than those required for the design of paper questionnaires or computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) instruments. However, this is more than offset by the current operational savings, due to self-administration of the survey instrument. The savings in the direct costs of interviewers, their training and control, are substantial. While other self-administered instruments, such as mail questionnaires and simple email collection, share with Internet surveys the advantage of not requiring the intermediary function of interviewers, for Internet surveys the costs involved in the control of unit and item nonresponse, callbacks, and editing are minimal and lower, in general, than those for other self-administered modes.

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