Designing and Implementing Web Surveys

Web surveys have emerged as one of the most popular methods of data collection. The facts that they can be quickly implemented and potentially at a low cost 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 new opportunities. This course offers practical guidance on the design and implementation of web surveys. It delves 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 is 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), of requests for sharing new data types (e.g., visual data), and data fusion with other sources (e.g., digital traces).

In the lab sessions, the participants will have the hands-on opportunities to apply the concepts learned in the lectures. In particular, they will program and implement a short survey using LimeSurvey and/or Google Forms and work with existing web (para)data.

Course leader

Melanie Revilla is a survey methodologist researcher at IBEI.

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 the new developments in web surveys.

Prerequisites:
- Some familiarity with surveys and questionnaire design (in general, not specific to web surveys) is useful.

Course aim

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