The Economics of Online Surveys

I posted a companion piece to this post on Socrates Tech a few minutes ago. Researchers in pyschology are finding that people will go online to take surveys, which provides them with a richer data base than the traditional method of surveying undergraduate students.

Some sites offer small prizes to people who take part, or promise to post the results of the research. But more often than not, there is no reward.

"I think there are a lot of people who are just generally interested in filling out surveys - probably the same people who would do all the Cosmo surveys sitting in doctors' rooms," says Paula Saunders, who is running a survey on workplace bullying (www.psy.unsw.edu.au/BullyingSurvey) as part of her PhD research at the University of NSW.

Researchers like the swing to online surveying because it takes them to a global audience at a low cost. It seems to put the subjects more at ease: it is far easier to share secrets, intimacies, fears and embarrassments behind the anonymity of their computer screen than face-to-face with a research assistant.

"When I advertised for face-to-face participants, I had a great deal of reluctance. I had people phone and say they are interested, but quite often they will give me false names after talking to me six times trying to get a feel for whether or not they can trust me," says Saunders. "It's been a huge struggle. With this, I think people feel more comfortable expressing themselves because they know I don't know who they are and I won't be able to track them."

David Mallard, a psychology lecturer at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, has used online surveys for research since 2002, including one no longer online that flashed up a series of photos re-enacting a mugging. A week after watching the crime onscreen, folks who took part were asked to return to the site to view mug shots to see if they could correctly identify the perpetrator and detail some other aspects of what they had witnessed.

The followup for economists is obvious. If the psychology faculty are finding that online surveys provide richer, more economically acquired data, there's no reason it can't be done by economists.