Online interview

Methodological aspects

Recruitment of respondents

The interviewer for example, can be requested by e -mail, post or by telephone to participate. Is a wide spread demand or just a special group of people interesting, so display (banners, popup, popin, layers ) are switched or published calls for participation on websites or in thematically relevant forums. In the cases in which people will not be contacted individually, they come across while surfing more or less to the invitation to participate and then decide for themselves whether they want to go through the questionnaire or not.

In particular, the frequently encountered on websites survey that anyone can participate without special request, are often criticized for scientific use. Respondents are not controlled selected for sampling from a population, but decide themselves to participate ( self-selection ). Is generally critical of the lack of representativeness of such selection. It is important to distinguish, however, whether the population of those who read the call with the interesting population is identical ( in a survey about the quality of a single site ) or not ( such as when the entire population of a country is to be examined ). There is no question that the self-selection is associated with certain personal characteristics over which little is known.

The multiple voting by individual participants may not always be prevented. Protection measures ( storage of the IP address, use of cookies, spelling, etc.) are relatively easy to handle, so an automated mass tuning is possible by individuals. Can reliably prevent you multiple agreements only if the interviewer in advance to be contacted individually and thereby get a special access key. Yet the anonymity of the respondents can be ensured through appropriate procedures.

Practically multiple agreements are limited problematic, namely in polls. In most scientific surveys people can not achieve your goals by answering questions. That is why hardly anyone will make the effort to answer questionnaires several times or even to develop a technical solution for multiple answer.

New possibilities for online survey

The Internet as a survey medium offers the interviewer interesting possibilities for the development of questionnaires, some of which are reserved for the personal interview or in other survey forms can not be used. To acquire subscribers via the Internet offer the most online panels at a premium. This is usually paid in the form of cash or vouchers for each completed online survey to the voluntary participants. As a result, websites that specialize in Internet on teaching participants and panels, and thus a new branch is created in online market research.

Novel types of questions

The online survey allows the use of question types that are connected in a face-to -face interview or on paper, is not possible or at high cost

• Slider for variable input of the response value ( visual analog scale)
• Drag -and-drop to sort items
• Movies, images and audio

Adaptive leadership questionnaire

In addition to an adaptive question management on the basis of already acquired responses ( filter), responses can also form new questions. Thus, the specification of a vehicle "Auto XY" allows the use in a further question: " How satisfied are you with your Auto XY? " On the basis of personal data an individual approach is possible, which can increase the acceptance by the participants when it is used wisely. Unnecessary questions can be avoided. Moreover, in extensive rating studies in which individual participants only a subset of the stimuli to be evaluated is shown the sequence of stimuli are balanced so that each stimulus is presented with equal frequency.

Automatic controls

Easy -to-implement automatic controls can help to increase the validity of:

• Avoid row position effects by item rotation
• Plausibility check for open inputs and Answers
• Ausfüllkontrolle
• Detection of the processing time ( Allows along with control issues, the formation of a validity index )

However, the use of automated plausibility checks may also be associated with disadvantages, for example, when people want to watch the full questionnaire and specify irrelevant data in order to see the next pages. Implausible or missing responses can greatly simplify the data cleanup in this case. Motivated respondents are in well-constructed questionnaires usually without automatic control of plausible answers. A compulsion to fill in is then often only with individual questions make sense, such as when respondents might miss an item.

Benefits of Online Survey

• Online surveys can be implemented much faster than face-to -face interviews. For small samples ( approximately 200 cases) telephone surveys and online surveys are about the same speed. In large samples, the results of online surveys, however, are usually available faster.
• Online surveys are significantly cheaper (except for samples with low incidence in online panels ) than face-to -face interviews and telephone interviews.
• The data collected on the server are immediately available. In general, can be any time between descriptive reports the main results produce.
• The interviewer influence and thus also the social impact on answering questions omitted.
• The manual entry of paper questionnaires omitted, registration errors can not occur.
• Multimedia interviews are possible: It can save images and movies are shown and it can be played eg jingles.
• The deadline for responses is computerized, that is, certain methods (such as conjoint measurement ) can be relatively easily integrated.
• The cost of the internationalization of questionnaires is low, the participant can choose his own language survey
• The respondent decides when he can spare the time for the interview.
• Special interest groups or geographically dispersed audiences are easily approachable, offline would mean enormous effort.
• The questionnaire can be implemented as a program (technical variant 2). If you choose this option, a logically consistent questionnaire pass is guaranteed.
• The data quality of data collected online is usually high.
• The data collected by standardized are also comparable in the long term.

Disadvantages of online survey

• Representativeness Especially at the beginning of online research the biggest methodological problem was the lack of representativeness of the random sample. On the one end of the 1990s were only a few people on the Internet, so that the results from Internet surveys could be transferred to the general population in any way. This problem has been by the high Internet coverage, especially in the most frequently surveyed target group of 18 -, now reduced to 49 -year-olds, yet rich an availability of 67 % currently (as of 2009 ) is not sufficient for population-representative surveys. Especially older target groups can be reached even harder online. Restrictive but must also be said at this point that phone surveys have a similar issue in the opposite direction: These in turn reach younger audiences no longer, because these do not use a traditional fixed-network connection more or can not be listed in the phone book. One solution is so-called "mixed -mode" surveys that go both ways.
• Especially in the pioneering phase of online research people were simply recruited in surveys in large numbers by banners. Also, this procedure leads to non-representative sampling procedures, as held by the substantive orientation of the sites being advertised on those pre-selected. In addition, find a self- selection of subjects instead of ( self-selection ). This problem has been solved by the establishment of large respondents pools, so-called panels. Here it is decided only by the leading Institute, which takes part in a survey panel participants. The online panels a certain self - selectivity can not escape, but the panel research is now accepted as sufficiently representative in practice.

Discussion of the methodological drawbacks

• Representativity of the sample: The accessibility of all elements of the sample is given in the following cases or can be prepared: If the interview subject is itself the Internet or an Internet access requires.
• When respondents are recruited by phone or on another route through which the population can in principle be fully achieved, but these people should then not have online access, it must be questioned by other survey method.

Two examples of online surveys

Employee surveys within companies and (global) corporations

Here many of the disadvantages discussed this survey form are less pronounced and more controllable. The population can be uniquely determined; can be clearly identified by staff lists, who belongs to the population and who is not. In most organizations today, all employees have the opportunity of the Internet or intranet access. Target population and survey population (ie the set of objects of the base population from which the sample is drawn in fact ) have such a high level of agreement. However, also applies to online surveys in companies that the persons to be interviewed are selected by appropriate sampling methods. Surveys, where the participants themselves decide whether they participate or not ( self-selection ) do not meet the requirements of a representative survey ( see, for example, the standards for conducting online surveys of the working group of German Market and Social Research Institute eV - ADM).

After all, the company can assign through communication and speech of its employees to a survey a high priority, thus reducing the risk that selected employees do not participate or cancel the interview prematurely. Other advantages are fully utilized: The interview may be conducted within a short time all over the world at very low cost. Time and place do not matter, the cost of communication have already been paid by the already existing networking and Internet presence in most cases.

Ad testing with CATI accompaniment

In this interview form a Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI ) - and an online interview conducted simultaneously. Since the recruitment is done via the CATI interview and the interviewer shall ensure that the respondent does not terminate prematurely, major disadvantages of the online survey are off. The CATI interviewer goes through the online questionnaire together with the person interviewed. Either he asks the questions and gives the answers in his CATI questionnaire or the respondent 's self in the online questionnaire responses. Mixed forms are also conceivable. This survey type is frequently used when motifs or packaging designs are to be evaluated. It combines the advantages of direct speech from the telephone interview with the multimedia capacity of the Internet.

Economy

In addition to the other survey methods ( questionnaire - in writing, face-to -face and telephone) are the online surveys in their efficiency in many cases a serious alternative. Cost advantages to an online survey:

• Cost-effective implementation of the survey on the internet
• Low cost evaluation by electronic data processing