Designing and Implementing Web Surveys

About

Web surveys have emerged as one of the most popular methods of data collection. The fact that they can be implemented quickly and potentially at a low cost has made them more and more popular. This transition to web surveys became even quicker since the Covid-19 pandemic started, due to the challenges to implement face-to-face surveys.
The increasing prevalence of web surveys brings both new challenges and opportunities. This course will offer practical guidance on the design and implementation of web surveys. It will delve into aspects crucial for ensuring survey representativeness and data quality, covering topics such as sampling methods, answer scales available in web surveys and their potential impact on the results, layout and programming decisions, and paradata utilization. Special emphasis will be placed on mobile participation, disparities between smartphone and PC responses, and leveraging innovative techniques to enhance data quality, including the use of new scales (e.g., emojis), requests for sharing new data types (e.g., visual data), and data fusion with other sources (e.g., digital traces).
In the lab sessions, you will have hands-on opportunities to apply the concepts learned in the lectures. In particular, you will program and implement a short survey using LimeSurvey and Google Forms and work with existing web (para)data using R

Course leader

Melanie Revilla, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Patricia Iglesias (Teaching Assistant), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Target group

You will find the course useful if:
- you are planning to design your own web survey,
- you are working with data from existing web surveys (e.g., data from existing online panels),
- you want to better interpret results from web surveys that you are reading in publications,
- you want to learn about new developments to go beyond conventional web surveys

Course aim

By the end of the course, you will:
- understand the different types of web surveys and their main advantages and limitations,
- have the foundational knowledge to implement your own effective web surveys,
- be able to evaluate the pros and cons of various web questionnaire features,
- be able to critically use web survey data,
- know about new opportunities in web surveys and the associated challenges

Fee info

The rates include the tuition fee, course materials, the academic program, social and plenary program, and coffee/tea breaks