Principles for constructing web surveys

2000

Public opinion quarterly, 2001

Many claims are being made about the advantages of conducting surveys on the Web. However, there has been little research on the effects of format or design on the levels of unit and item response or on data quality. In a study conducted at the University of Michigan, a number of experiments were added to a survey of the student population to assess the impact of design features on resulting data quality. A sample of 1,602 students was sent an e-mail invitation to participate in a Web survey on attitudes toward affirmative action. Three experiments on design approaches were added to the survey application. One experiment varied whether respondents were reminded of their progress through the instrument. In a second experiment, one version presented several related items on one screen, while the other version presented one question per screen. In a third experiment, for one series of questions a random half of the sample clicked radio buttons to indicate their answers, while the other half entered a numeric response in a box. This article discusses the overall implementation and outcome of the survey, and it describes the results of the imbedded design experiments.

1999

Public Opinion Quarterly, 2004

Marketing Letters, 2004

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The first objective of this article is to propose a conceptual framework of the effects of on-line questionnaire design on the quality of collected responses. Secondly, we present the results of an experiment where different protocols have been tested and compared in a randomised design using the basis of several quality indexes. Starting from some previous categorizations, and from the main factors identified in the literature, we first propose an initial global framework of the questionnaire and question characteristics in a web survey, divided into five groups of factors. Our framework was built to follow the response process successive stages of the contact between the respondent and the questionnaire itself. Then, because it has been studied in the survey methodology literature in a very restricted way, the concept of 'response quality' is discussed and extended with some more 'qualitative' criteria that could be helpful for researchers and practitioners, in order to obtain a deeper assessment of the survey output. As an experiment, on the basis of the factors chosen as major characteristics of the questionnaire design, eight versions of a questionnaire related to young people's consumption patterns were created. The links to these on-line questionnaires were sent in November 2005 to a target of 10,000 young people. The article finally presents the results of our study and discusses the conclusions. Very interesting results come to light; especially regarding the influence of length, interaction and question wording dimensions on response quality. We discuss the effects of Web-questionnaire design characteristics on the quality of data.

2020

2016

Web survey is an increasingly popular self-administered survey method, which allows researchers to reach a large number of respondents at a low cost, and present survey content with multimedia (Couper, 2000; Ha et al., 2015). Hoonakker and Carayon (2009) defined Web survey as one that is stored in a Web server, and participants will be provided a link to complete the survey on a Web page and submit it to the researcher. Web survey has advantages such as easy access to a large population, faster speed, lower costs, less time and error in response entry, easy to administer, higher flexibility, more design options, and higher response quality. Web survey eliminates response entry burden and error on the researcher and can reach people in different locations at the same time. However, as Dillman, Smyth & Christian (2014) pointed out, it also suffers from disadvantages such as under-coverage of older and low education population and population without Internet access, difficult to conduct a random sample, measurement and nonresponse errors, the concern of anonymity, computer security and illiteracy, and deliverability. Research shows that recruiting iPhone users to complete a web survey is more difficult than computer recruitment (Buskirk & Andrus, 2014). Buskirk and Andrus explain that this is because the sample is recruited from an online computer panel. They did increase internal validity by only recruiting iPhone users, but they are sacrificing the generalizability because