A comparison of surveys using different modes of data collection: European social surveys versus LISS panel

Abstract

Web surveys are becoming more and more popular in survey research, mainly because of their lower costs. With the increase of the Internet coverage in most European countries, the response rates are becoming high enough to collect huge amount of data in a short period of time. However, there is a risk that changing to this new mode would lead to data incomparable with data collected in the past. Therefore it is necessary to check if data collected using Web and data collected with more traditional modes (mainly mail, telephone, face-to-face) produce similar results. This paper compares one survey completed by the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social sciences (LISS) panel (Web panel based on probability sample) in December 2008 with the same questions asked in the frame of the European Social Survey (faceto-face) in the Netherlands. Focusing on the quality of single items and composite scores, we find few differences between these two surveys.