Sampling Methods for Web and E-mail Surveys <s> Web-based recruitment issues and effects <s> The Internet's potential for academic and applied research has recently begun to be acknowledged and assessed. To date, researchers have used Web page-based surveys to study large groups of on-line users and e-mail surveys to study smaller, more homogenous on-line user groups. A relatively untapped use for the Internet is to use e-mail to survey broader Internet populations on both a national and international basis. Our experience using e-mail to study a national sample of Internet users is presented, beginning with a discussion of how a sample of on-line users can be selected using a ‘people finder’ search engine. We include an evaluation of the demographic characteristics of the respondent pool compared to both a web page-based survey and a telephone survey of Internet users. Considerations for researchers who are evaluating this method for their own studies are provided. <s> BIB001 </s> Sampling Methods for Web and E-mail Surveys <s> Web-based recruitment issues and effects <s> Using the Internet to conduct quantitative research presents challenges not found in conventional research. Paper-based survey quality criteria cannot be completely adapted to electronic formats. Electronic surveys have distinctive technological, demographic, and response characteristics that affect their design, use, and implementation. Survey design, participant privacy and confidentiality, sampling and subject solicitation, distribution methods and response rates, and survey piloting are critical methodological components that must be addressed. In this article, quality criteria for electronic survey design and use based on an investigation of recent electronic survey literature are presented. The application of these criteria to reach a hard-to-involve online population-nonpublic participants of online communities (also known as "lurkers")-and survey them on their community participation, a topic not salient to the purpose of their online communities is demonstrated in a case study. The results show t... <s> BIB002 </s> Sampling Methods for Web and E-mail Surveys <s> Web-based recruitment issues and effects <s> This article provides a basic report about subject recruitment processes for Web-based surveys. Using data from our ongoing Internet Survey of American Opinion project, two different recruitment techniques (banner advertisement and subscription campaigns) are compared. This comparison, together with a typology of Web-based surveys, provides insight into the validity and generalizability of Internet survey data. The results from this analysis show that, although Internet survey respondents differ demographically from the American population, the relationships among variables are similar across recruitment methods and match those implied by substantive theory. Thus, our research documents the basic methodology of subject acquisition for Web-based surveys, which, as we argue in our conclusion, may soon become the survey interview mode of choice for social scientists. <s> BIB003
Whether e-mail addresses are constructed, assembled from third-party sources, or harvested directly from the web, there is the issue of unsolicited survey e-mail as spam. For example, BIB001 conducted a survey with e-mail addresses harvested from www.Four11.com and stated, 'Several individuals receiving the solicitation e-mail censured the researchers for sending out unsolicited e-mails, and accused the researchers of "spamming". ' They further recounted that 'One [ISP] system operator [who observed a large number of e-mail messages originating from a single address] then contacted his counterpart at our university.' In addition, distributing an unsolicited Internet-based survey is also not without its perils. For example, BIB002 report on a study of 'hard-to-involve Internet users' -those who lurk in, but do not participate publicly in, online discussion forums. In their study, an invitation to participate in a web survey was posted as a message to 375 online community discussion boards. While they collected 1,188 valid responses (out of 77,582 discussion board members), they also 'received unsolicited email offers, some of which were pornographic in content or aggressive in tone' and they had their web server hacked twice, once with the infection of a virus. In spite of the challenges and possible perils, it is possible to recruit survey participants from the web. For example, BIB003 conducted two Internet-based recruitment efforts -one using banner advertisements on web pages and another using a subscription check box. In brief, their results were as follows. • In the first recruitment effort, Alvarez et al. ran four 'banner' campaigns in 2000 with the intention of recruiting survey participants using web-page banner advertisements. In the first campaign, which is representative of the other three, an animated banner advertisement resulted in more than 3.5 million 'impressions' (the number of times the banner was displayed), which resulted in the banner being clicked 10,652 times, or a rate of 3 clicks per 1,000 displays. From these 10,652 clicks, 599 survey participants were recruited. • In the second recruitment effort, the authors ran a 'subscription' campaign in 2001 in which they arranged with a commercial organization to have a check box added to subscription forms on various websites. Essentially, Internet users who were registering for some service were given an opportunity to check a box on the service's subscription form indicating their willingness to participate in a survey. As part of this effort, the authors conducted two recruitment drives, each of which was intended to net 10,000 subscriptions. Across the two campaigns, 6,789 new survey participants were obtained from 21,378 subscribers. The good news from the Alvarez et al. (2002) study is that, even though the banner approach yielded fewer new survey participants, both methods resulted in a significant number of potential survey respondents over a relatively short period of time 3,431 new subjects over the course of six or seven weeks from the banner campaigns, and 6,789 new subjects over the course of three weeks from the subscription campaigns. Each banner subject cost about $7.29 to recruit, while the subscription subjects cost only $1.27 per subject. (Unfortunately, the authors did not present any data on survey completion rates, so we do not know whether there were differences between the two samples that might have favored one over the other). The bad news is that the two groups differed significantly in all of the demographic categories collected (gender, age, race, and education) and they differed in how they answered questions on exactly the same survey. In addition, both groups differed significantly from the demographics of the Internet population as measured by the August 2000 Current Population Survey. The problem, of course, is that there are clear effects associated with how subjects are recruited, such that the resulting samples are different even from the general Internet population. BIB001 found similar recruitment method biases. Hence, while it is possible to ethically recruit survey participants from the web, it seems that the recruitment methodology affects the types of individual that self-select into the sample.