Can Online Surveys Represent the Entire Population?

Elisabeth Grewenig, Philipp Lergetporer, Lisa Simon, Katharina Werner and Ludger Woessmann

No 11799, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: A general concern with the representativeness of online surveys is that they exclude the "offline" population that does not use the internet. We run a large-scale opinion survey with (1) onliners in web mode, (2) offliners in face-to-face mode, and (3) onliners in face-to-face mode. We find marked response differences between onliners and offliners in the mixed-mode setting (1 vs. 2). Response differences between onliners and offliners in the same face-to-face mode (2 vs. 3) disappear when controlling for background characteristics, indicating mode effects rather than unobserved population differences. Differences in background characteristics of onliners in the two modes (1 vs. 3) indicate that mode effects partly reflect sampling differences. In our setting, re-weighting online-survey observations appears a pragmatic solution when aiming at representativeness for the entire population.

Keywords: offliner; mode effects; representativeness; online survey; public opinion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C83 D91 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2018-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (40)

Published - published as 'Can Internet Surveys Represent the Entire Population? A Practitioners’ Analysis' in: European Journal of Political Economy 2023, 78, 102382

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11799.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Can Online Surveys Represent the Entire Population? (2018)
Working Paper: Can Online Surveys Represent the Entire Population? (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11799

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().