Overcoming the Digital Divide in Web Surveys |
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| Coordinator 1 | Dr Carina Cornesse (University of Mannheim) |
| Coordinator 2 | Ms Jessica Herzing (LINES/FORS, University of Lausanne) |
| Coordinator 3 | Dr Lars Kaczmirek (University of Vienna and Australian National University) |
In many parts of the world, the internet is now available to nearly everybody at all times and places. However, not everybody is willing and able to use the internet. Reasons for not using the internet are lack of internet access (mostly in rural areas), data protection concerns and fear of fraud on the internet, as well as low digital literacy. Furthermore, even people that are generally willing and able to use the internet vary with regard to devices used, duration and frequency of internet use, variety of internet activities, and purpose of internet use (e.g., only for work or private purposes).
The literature commonly refers to this phenomenon as “digital divide” which is associated to inequalities between people at different socioeconomic levels or with differing demographic characteristics. In addition, the digital divide differentiates people with regard to digital device, digital access, and digital usage. Hence, the digital divide poses a challenge to the survey landscape in general and web surveys in particular. For example, undercoverage of people without internet access threatens the generalizability of survey findings to the general population. In addition, using advanced technical features such as slider scales, drop-down lists, or avatars can confuse respondents with low technical skills and increase measurement error.
Survey methodologists are therefore working on overcoming the digital divide challenge in web surveys. For example, to prevent undercoverage of the offline populations, researchers apply strategies such as providing respondents with the necessary equipment to participate online or implementing mixed-mode strategies to include people who cannot or do not want to participate online. Regarding measurement error, researchers are testing different approaches to simplify and ensure error-free responding, such as providing lookup databases and web probing.
For this session, we invite submissions from researchers who apply and test approaches to overcoming the digital divide in web surveys. We especially encourage submissions of papers that compare different approaches to overcoming the digital divide in web surveys (e.g., mixed-mode approaches, weighting). Furthermore, we are interested in submissions that take into account and empirically disentangle different types of errors due to the digital divide in web surveys (for example coverage error and measurement error).