People and Computers XIX - The Bigger Picture
Author | : Tom McEwan |
Publisher | : Springer Science & Business Media |
Total Pages | : 509 |
Release | : 2007-12-20 |
ISBN-10 | : 9781846282492 |
ISBN-13 | : 1846282497 |
Rating | : 4/5 (497 Downloads) |
Download or read book People and Computers XIX - The Bigger Picture written by Tom McEwan and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-12-20 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a new medium for questionnaire delivery, the Internet has the potential to revolutionize the survey process. Online (Web-based) questionnaires provide several advantages over traditional survey methods in terms of cost, speed, appearance, flexibility, functionality, and usability [Bandilla et al. 2003; Dillman 2000; Kwak & Radler 2002]. Online-questionnaires can provide many capabilities not found in traditional paper-based questionnaires: they can include pop-up instructions and error messages; they can incorporate links; and it is possible to encode difficult skip patterns making such patterns virtually invisible to respondents. Despite this, and the emergence of numerous tools to support online-questionnaire creation, current electronic survey design typically replicates the look-and-feel of pap- based questionnaires, thus failing to harness the full power of the electronic survey medium. A recent environmental scan of online-questionnaire design tools found that little, if any, support is incorporated within these tools to guide questionnaire design according to best-practice [Lumsden & Morgan 2005]. This paper briefly introduces a comprehensive set of guidelines for the design of online-questionnaires. It then focuses on an informal observational study that has been conducted as an initial assessment of the value of the set of guidelines as a practical reference guide during online-questionnaire design. 2 Background Online-questionnaires are often criticized in terms of their vulnerability to the four standard survey error types: namely, coverage, non-response, sampling, and measurement errors.