Conducting Web-Based Surveys

Web-based surveys are becoming increasingly popular in marketing and social science research. The developing interest in Web-based surveying is not surprising as the Internet becomes an ever more useful, familiar and widely used means of communication.

Web-based surveying offers a number of advantages over more traditional CATI and mail techniques. Web-based surveys are faster and cheaper than telephone and mail surveys, and they avoid the error-prone, tedious and time-consuming task of data entry.

Compared to old fashioned paper surveys:

• Paper, postage, mail out, and data entry costs are almost completely eliminated.
• Once the survey is developed, the cost of surveying additional respondents is low.
• Results such as cross-tabulations can be achieved almost immediately on-line.
• It is easy to follow up people surveyed who have not responded.
• Data are easily imported into data analysis programs.

Web-based surveys are also much cheaper and somewhat faster than telephone surveys and again data entry is less expensive and possibly more accurate because the data are entered directly by the respondents themselves, not by an interviewer.

A major problem with web-based surveys is sampling. For research applications a random sample is desirable and often essential, and researchers may simply not have a comprehensive list of email addresses for people who drink fruit juices or go to church.

Despite the huge growth of the Internet there are still many people who do not have access or choose not to use the Internet. There are also wide disparities in Internet access among ethnic, socioeconomic and demographic groups.

For web-based surveys the sampling problem is no different from other types of surveys, it is just that access to a population may be more limited for web-based surveys because fewer people have access to the Internet than have telephones or home addresses.

Even with telephone surveys and random number dialing through CATI a truly random sample is not guaranteed. Although in many developed nations most people have a landline telephone as well, probably, as a mobile phone, in developing nations the landline is often skipped for direct purchase of a mobile phone and there is usually no central directory for mobile phones. So CATI that uses landlines is increasingly unlikely to connect with any population.

There are of course other sampling problems with CATI surveys. Not everyone is at home when telephone surveys are most likely, in the evenings and weekends, so there is a significant non-response rate, and some people have no telephone at all. CATI may still have the ability to reach most of a population in a country where landline phones predominate but it will never be able to reach all members of the population, which is what random sampling requires. So any attempt to get a true random sample is almost certainly doomed unless the population is well defined and accessible whatever survey method is used.

The rapid growth of the Internet has impacted on so many different aspects of society that it would be surprising if survey research were an exception.

Improved technology has also made web-based surveys more practical. Until fairly recently email surveys were the predominant means of carrying out Internet surveys. Now the use of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) forms in Web-based surveys are becoming the dominant method of gathering survey data. These forms streamline the data collection process and allow the entry of responses directly into a database. Since HTML forms can be made programmable, this also facilitates real time error checking which increases the accuracy of the data collection process.

The formatting capabilities of HTML also allow the creation of easy-to-read and attractive forms that may improve response rates. In addition, because HTML forms are programmable questions can be randomly ordered and it is possible to tailor skip and branching options to responses provided earlier in the survey so that a web-based questionnaire can be made as flexible as a CATI interview.

While sampling may be an issue for web-based survey research, many applications of the technology do not present sampling problems. Examples include: companies collecting customer satisfaction data, employers measuring job satisfaction, educators collecting course evaluations and conducting examinations, bloggers wanting to consult with their readers and event organizers checking proposed attendance and meal and other preferences.

While there is still a need for some caution, until we learn how to use the new technology with confidence the use of Web-based surveying is growing rapidly and will clearly continue to grow.

We offer something new in web-based surveys and that is qualitative research on-line. This Delphi based methodology has all the advantages of focus group research and few of the many disadvantages.

Michael Petty PhD
www.lasir.net

Article Source: http://www.marketingarticlelibrary.com

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