The role of online research panels in surveying hard-to-reach populations |
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| Coordinator 1 | Professor Agata Górny (University of Warsaw) |
| Coordinator 2 | Dr Barbara Jancewicz (University of Warsaw) |
Online surveys and research panels are gaining in importance in scientific and marketing research. They allow a cost-effective way to recruit respondents and collect data from people in a wide geographical area. Importantly, research panels enable obtaining representative samples and facilitate longitudinal research for reasonable cost and research effort.
The session aims to discuss uses of online surveys and especially online research panels to study hard-to-reach populations, such as migrants, platform workers, people with disabilities etc. We are particularly interested in their role in longitudinal research.
There are various methods of participants’ recruitment to online surveys (e.g. social media platforms, internet groups, targeted mailing), which can be implemented also in the case of hard-to-reach populations. One of them is using online research panels, which involves at least two approaches. The first is recruitment of hard-to-reach groups from the existing online panels of general populations. This approach uses the existing infrastructure, but risks reaching insufficient sample (small and/or biased). The second solution involves building an online research panel dedicated to a certain hard-to-reach population (e.g. migrants in the given country). However, it usually requires relatively high investments and effort due to comparatively difficult recruitment of participants.
We invite researchers to share their experiences with online surveys using research panels and also other methods of recruitment in studies of hard-to-reach populations, particularly longitudinal ones. The session provides the floor to a broad range of topics related to online panels’ research practice, such as recruitment, representativeness, attrition, cost-effectiveness and other issues posing challenges in studying hard-to-reach populations. We encourage participants to share both positive and negative research experiences.