New Methodological Approaches: Aspects of Online Questionnaires

Abstract

The internet is used by social scientists in a lot of ways to gather data about social phenomena; there are Web-based questionnaires, Web experiments, observations of virtual worlds, case narrations, content analyses, and analysis of mailing lists and other log data (Batanic/Reips/Bo njak 2002: back cover). In order to classify the huge amount of different activities social scientists use the web for into categories, Reips (2002: 229) distinguishes between (1) non-reactive data collection; (2) online surveys; and (3) web experiments. The analysis of server log files or of contributions in news groups are examples for non reactive data collections. These data bases cannot be changed afterwards by the people who contributed to them; and this feature is the defining condition for non-reactiveness. But these tasks as well as the important topic of web experiments will not be dealt with here. The only focus of the present small paper will be on online surveys. Concerning that issue there will be some theoretical remarks (theoretical is meant here in a na ve sense) and some practical remarks.