Mario Callegaro, Katja Lozar Manfreda, and Vasia Vehovar. Web Survey Methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 2015. 318 pp. $47.00 (paper)

Abstract

Some books about web surveys address the question of how the web can be used to implement the kind of survey that in the past would have been done using some other mode. Examples are Tourangeau, Conrad, and Couper (2013) and Dillman, Smyth, and Christian (2014). The tacit or explicit assumption of these books is that readers want to collect data from a sample drawn from a defined population in order to create valid statistical descriptions of that population. Web Survey Methodology is a different kind of book.This book comes close to taking as its province all the ways the web can be used to gather information. I believe the first mention of a general population survey is on page 27. Explicitly, the authors state on page 9 that “we have defined the web survey mode as having no genuine link to sampling.” The web is a mode by which information can be collected from all kinds of people in all kinds of ways, and they try to cover it all. The one limit, I believe, is that they do restrict themselves to data collected by having respondents answer questions, though they do attend to the potential to collect other kinds of data as well, including paradata about the question answering process.