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Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access published online on October 31, 2008
Public Opinion Quarterly, doi:10.1093/poq/nfn045
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© The Author 2008. 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

Face-to-Face Versus Web Surveying in a High-Internet-Coverage Population

Differences in Response Quality

Dirk Heerwegh and Geert Loosveldt

Address correspondence to Dirk Heerwegh; e-mail: dirk.heerwegh{at}soc.kuleuven.be

The current study experimentally investigates the differences in data quality between a face-to-face and a web survey. Based on satisficing theory, it was hypothesized that web survey respondents would be more likely to satisfice for a multitude of reasons, thereby producing data of lower quality. The data show support for the hypothesis. Web survey respondents were shown to produce a higher "don't know" response rate, to differentiate less on rating scales, and to produce more item nonresponse than face-to-face survey respondents.

DIRK HEERWEGH AND GEERT LOOSVELDT are with the Center for Sociological Research (CeSO), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Parkstraat 45 Box 3601, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. The authors would like to thank Ingrid Willems of University of Antwerp, Belgium, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. The first author gratefully acknowledges support for this research from a postdoctoral research grant of the KULeuven Research Fund (BOF) and from a postdoctoral research grant of the FWO Flanders (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Vlaanderen). Errors remaining and views expressed are the authors’.


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