Читать книгу Handbook of Web Surveys - Jelke Bethlehem - Страница 17

The first test with an e‐mail survey at Statistics Netherlands was carried out in 1998. At the time, Internet browsers and HTML were not sufficiently developed and used to make a web survey feasible.

Objective of the test was to explore to what extent e‐mail could be used to collect data for the survey on short‐term indicators. This was a non‐compulsory panel survey, where companies answered a small number of questions about production expectations, order‐books, and stocks.

The traditionally mode of data collection for this survey was a mail survey.

The test was conducted in one of the waves of the survey. 1,600 companies were asked to participate in the test. If they did, they had to provide their e‐mail address. About 190 companies agreed to participate. These were mainly larger companies with a well‐developed computer infrastructure.

A simple text form was sent to these companies by means of e‐mail. After activating the reply option, respondents could fill in answers in the text. It was a software‐independent and platform‐independent solution, but rather primitive from a respondent's point of view.

The test was a success. The response rate among the participating companies was almost 90%. No technical problems were encountered. Overall, respondents were positive. However, they considered the text‐based questionnaire old‐fashioned, and not very user friendly.

More details about this first test with an e‐mail survey at Statistics Netherlands can be found in Roos, Jaspers, and Snijkers (1999).

It should be noted that e‐mail can also be used in a different way to send a questionnaire to a respondent. An electronic questionnaire can be offered as an executable file that is attached to the e‐mail. The respondents download this interview program on their computers and run it. The advantage of this approach is that such a computer program can have a better graphical user interface. Such a program can also include routing instructions and checks. This way of data collection is sometimes called CASI. Example 1.4 describe an example of a CASI approach.