How Representative Are Google Consumer Surveys?: Results from an Analysis of Google Consumer Survey Questions Relative to National Level Benchmarks

• Activity Number: 186
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 5, 2013 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Erin Tanenbaum*+ and Michael Stern and Parvati Krishnamurty
• Companies: NORC at the University of Chicago and NORC at the University of Chicago and NORC, at the University of Chicago
• Keywords: web survey ; Google Consumer Survey ; coverage ; cell-only households ; non-probability sample ; bias

Abstract

The decrease in coverage for traditional random digit dialing (RDD) samples is well documented (e.g., Blumberg et al. 2011). The decline in landline connections, particularly for young people, makes coverage especially problematic (Keeter et al. 2007). Although mobile phones can be added to landline sample frames to increase coverage, this dual frame approach introduces challenges, as they are more prone to nonsampling errors in comparison to RDD and are often counted against the respondent's minutes (Brick et al. 2011). Non-probability Web-based supplements have been suggested as a means to reducing problems with RDD coverage and picking up cell-only households without respondent-side costs. However, this brings new questions. First, do we find cell-only households among non-probability Web samples? Second, how do Web-based results differ from national level random sample results? Third, how demographically different are the samples from mode varying probability samples? In this paper, we present an analysis of a series of Google Consumer Survey questions including home cell-phone usage and compare the results to those from three national-level random sample surveys.