In 20 years, online surveys of access panels (whose members are recruited by polling institutes to participate in several online surveys per year) have grown rapidly. They are faster, less expensive, and alone in front of his tablet or computer the person feels freer to speak than in the presence of an investigator. But the technique poses many problems of method. Sandra Hoibian shows this by comparing the responses to the CREDOC survey “Living conditions and aspirations of the French” depending on whether the person is interviewed online or face-to-face. Viviane le Hay discusses her results based on a similar experiment conducted from the CNCDH’s Racism Barometer and compares more broadly the respective strengths and biases of face-to-face, online and telephone surveys.
Sandra Hoibian is Director of the Society division at CREDOC. She has published “Une approche de l’effet du passage sur Internet d’une enquête en population générale”, Credoc, Cahier de recherche C323, 2015 (with Patricia Croutte, Emilie Daudey, Stéphane Legleye and Géraldine Charrance) and “Replicating a face-to-face survey on a web access panel? A multipanel comparison” (PDF 856 KB) (with Stéphane Legleye, Jérôme Cubillé, Patricia Croutte, Géraldine Charrance).
Vincent Tiberj (University of Bordeaux, Centre Emile Durkheim), specialist in field surveys and method questions and associated with the CNCDH’s Racism Barometer, has published “Putting into perspective thirty years of evolution by researchers”, in CNCDH, 2020 Report on the fight against racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, La documentation française, 2021.
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