Recruitment to an Internet Survey Panel: A Feasibility Test

National Opinion Research Center, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Recent years have seen the convergence of three trends in social science research: (1) a sharp increase across the social sciences in the use of survey data to address a wide range of important theoretical issues; (2) a sharp increase in the costs of conducting high quality surveys; and (3) a precipitous decline in the response rates of most such surveys being conducted by conventional methodologies. This project will address the need for cost-effective collection of data from highly representative survey samples. The key objective is to test whether households can be recruited to join an Internet survey panel that will meet the statistical requirements of federal agencies and academic researchers by combining area probability sampling, in-person recruitment of panel households, and web-based data collection. A second objective is to test if high participation rates can be maintained over time during a 12-month web-based data collection. Panel recruitment done by telephone in the past has imposed an upper limit on response rates below what some researchers and research agencies require. If this effort is successful in achieving high recruitment rates and maintaining high web survey participation rates, it will provide the scientific and practical justification for the implementation of this approach to survey data collection on a much larger scale.