Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on January 29, 2009
Public Opinion Quarterly 2008 72(5):831-835; doi:10.1093/poq/nfn066
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Web Survey Methods
Introduction
Address correspondence to Mick P. Couper; e-mail: mcouper@isr.umich.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
A key characteristic of Web surveys is their diversity. Unlike other modes of data collection, where the method tells us something about both the sampling process and the method of data collection, the term "Web survey" is too broad to give us much useful information about how the study was carried out. For example, referring to an RDD telephone survey describes both the method of sampling (in part) and the mode of data collection. But there are so many different ways to identify sampling frames for Web surveys, to invite people to complete such surveys, and to administer surveys over the Internet (see Couper 2000
) that the term "Web survey" conveys little evaluative information. The implications of this diversity are twofold. First, broad generalizations