Abstract
Web surveys are no longer completed on just a desktop or laptop computer.
Respondents increasingly use mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones
to complete web surveys. In this article, we study how respondents in the
American Life Panel complete surveys using varying devices. We show that about
30 percent of respondents sometimes complete surveys on a mobile device, and
about 12 percent always use a mobile device. We study the characteristics of
these “mobile-only” web survey respondents and find that they share many
characteristics of typically hard-to-recruit survey respondents. They are more
likely to be non-white, young, and not have a higher education. In terms of
voting behavior, we find no differences between the groups of survey respondents
who use different devices. This suggests that biases in political polls conducted
through web-surveys are unlikely to occur when mobile-only respondents are
underrepresented.
Respondents increasingly use mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones
to complete web surveys. In this article, we study how respondents in the
American Life Panel complete surveys using varying devices. We show that about
30 percent of respondents sometimes complete surveys on a mobile device, and
about 12 percent always use a mobile device. We study the characteristics of
these “mobile-only” web survey respondents and find that they share many
characteristics of typically hard-to-recruit survey respondents. They are more
likely to be non-white, young, and not have a higher education. In terms of
voting behavior, we find no differences between the groups of survey respondents
who use different devices. This suggests that biases in political polls conducted
through web-surveys are unlikely to occur when mobile-only respondents are
underrepresented.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-8 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Survey Practice |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2016 |