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

The full syllabus of the course including the day-to-day schedule will be published here in April.

You will find the course useful if:

By the end of the course, you will:

  

The course will be divided into lectures (around 3h per day, divided into 2 or 3 sessions) and lab sessions (also around 3h per day, divided into 2 or 3 sessions) including demonstrations and hands-on experience.

 

You should bring a laptop to class in order to work on the assignments. You will use LimeSurvey and/or Google Forms for programming a short web survey and will work with some existing web survey data (including paradata). Both individual and small group work will be possible. You are encouraged to bring your own web survey projects to class if you are working on one. The instructor will be available for individual and group consultations and to support work on assignments.

  

You will need to bring a laptop computer to successfully participate in this course.

 

We will use LimeSurvey and Google Forms to program short web surveys. We will also use R to do some simple data processing, but no previous experience in R is need.

 

Please install R (https://cran.r-project.org/) and RStudio (https://www.rstudio.com/) on your device before the course starts. These are free and open source.