Tuesday 16th July
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Innovations in Measurement Instrument Construction for Web-based Surveys |
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| Chair | Mr Ozan Kuru (University of Michigan) |
Due to many advantages, the web surveys are more and more frequently used in mixed mode studies, although like all other modes it also has its disadvantages. One of them is the bigger possibility that the respondent won't finish the questionnaire. Therefore a presentation will analyze the probabilities of interruption of self administrated web-surveys based on question characteristics.
The questions are classified according to characteristics like complexity, format, scales, openness to social desirability, and the question position in a questionnaire. The interruption probabilities are counted for each characteristic. Analyses are based on European Social Survey 2012 self administrated CAWI version, which was conducted in late 2012 in Estonia, with overall sample of 355 respondents. The results are compared with ESS main survey. Given study will help to identify answering peculiarities in CAWI mode, and give useful information for planning of mixed mode studies to minimize possible interruption in CAWI mode.
The social research on Facebook proliferated fast and have come from diverse fields and furthered interdisciplinary investigations. However the gap in the literature is the lack of consistent measurement of Facebook activity across diverse studies.
The current study addresses the measurement problems of Facebook activity. There are three important measurement issues in Facebook surveys. First is the variety of the scales; diverse measures that capture the dimensions of Facebook activity/usage in different ways have been detected, such as number of friends and time spent on Facebook (Burke, Marlow and Lento, 2010, integrated scales (Ellison et al, 2007), list of activities and motivations (Bumgarner, 2007) and attitude scales (Krasnova et al, 2010). Second, some of these scales have arguably suboptimal designs that could be improved (question wording and number of response options) (Pasek & Krosnick, 2010, Saris et al. 2010). Finally recent literature needs to address the changing nature of Facebook which introduced many new options and applications and has undergone important structural changes, such as the new privacy regulations and increasing mobile usage (Pew, 2012).
To address these issues, an online survey is being conducted. Facebook activity`s different scales in relation to each other, in relation to their optimized alternative ones (changes/improvements in question and response option wording etc.) and in relation to some social correlates that are widely studied in the literature (psychological, academic-professional, social-political etc.) are comparatively analyzed on a single sample. After a small pilot study of convenience sampling, data collection goes on.