Challenges and Strategies Involved in Adapting a Very Large-Scale Survey for Online Administration (303280)

Keywords: questionnaire design, online methodology, multi-mode

While a lot of research has been focused on strategies for adapting traditional paper and pencil surveys to online, much less work has been conducted on the adaption of very large (120+ page) surveys for online administration. This paper addresses the methodological challenges and associated strategies being deployed for adapting a very large-scale survey for online administration, in an effort to provide multi-mode opportunities for lengthy paper surveys to respondents. It explains our approach to questionnaire and survey navigation design and addresses the challenges of reducing respondent burden, while exploiting some of the benefits of online administration for improving data quality such as item nonresponse rates.

A number of key issues are discussed, including strategies for splitting the survey into modules, the associated design of navigation among those modules, the issues involved in providing progress feedback to the respondent, and the challenges revolving around devising the most effective means for encouraging respondents to return to the survey after temporarily leaving the survey. Additionally, we discuss the design and implementation of “soft controls” for critical filter questions, where, if the respondent moves on without answering the filter question, a soft control intervention is deployed to encourage the participant to respond to the gate question. Finally, we discuss some of the design challenges for very large surveys, where traditional wisdom about online survey administration such as scrolling may not always apply.

This paper features some of the critical design decisions involved in the monumental task of adapting a very large survey to the online environment, and is meant to be the first in a series of papers as we test these design strategies and report on the results of the different approaches.