Here - Tilburg University

Presenter
Kaczmirek, Lars; GESIS - Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Mannheim
Authors
Lars Kaczmirek: Dorothé Behr and Wolfgang Bandilla;
GESIS - Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Mannheim
Title
Availability of technologies for online surveys – an international comparison
Abstract
Design decisions for Web surveys are restricted by the assumptions about
the technologies respondents have available. Measurement problems might
occur when fully labelled scales are displayed on small computer screens or
when respondents participate via cell phones and other mobile devices such as
Netbooks, iPhone, Ipad, or Blackberry. In these cases, the required equidistance
of scale points could be violated. Other technologies whose availabili-ty are
relevant in this context are Flash technology and the respondents’ connection
speed, that are key indicators for successful video presentations, and Java Script
which is widely used in automatic data validation procedures. JavaScript is also
necessary for all interactive question types such as automatic tally questions or
visual analog scales. In the process of designing a survey, the availability of
these technologies is then highly relevant for the tech-nical pretest. As
pretesting is restricted to the most common combinations of technology, such as
specific browsers, mobile devices, and connection speed, it is important to know
which combinations really are the most common in the target group.
This study provides exactly this data on available technologies for
countries with different Internet penetration rates, namely Canada, Denmark,
Germany, Hungary, Spain, and the United States (N=480 per country, quotation
on age, gender and education). Data was col-lected automatically, similarly to
the collection of paradata, in January 2011 while respon-dents participated in an
Internet survey. The participants were sampled from online access panels. The
results provide information about the availability of technology in different de-
mographic groups: How do respondents access online surveys (connection