The Limitations of Online Surveys
By Chittaranjan Andrade. 2020
512 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Online surveys are growing in popularity, perhaps because they are an easy, convenient, and inexpensive means of data collection. Online surveys commonly suffer from two serious methodological limitations: the population to which they are distributed cannot be described, and respondents with biases may select themselves into the sample. Research is of value only when the findings from a sample can be generalized to a meaningful population. When the population addressed by the survey cannot be described, and when the sample is contaminated by respondents with biases, findings from online surveys cannot be generalized and may therefore mislead.
Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Sociology and Political Science, Evaluation & Benchmarks
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In Information Systems and Management
In Sociology and Political Science
- Irene Solaiman
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- Zeerak Talat
- Yacine Jernite
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- Su Lin Blodgett
- Margaret Mitchell
In Evaluation & Benchmarks
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- Alexandra Sasha Luccioni
- Jesse Dodge
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- Margaret Mitchell
- Sara Hooker
Citations in the corpus
- Evaluating the Social Impact of Generative AI Systems in Systems and Society (2023, background): “Evaluating the effect AI has on people and societies, and evaluating people and groups themselves encounters similar challenges as those arising in sampling [20], surveying [126], determining preferences [270], and working with human subjects [131, 12], in addition to challenges that stem from the p”