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Materials for Web Survey(-Experiments) short course

This repository holds materials for a workshop about Running Online Surveys with Nonprobability Samples to be taught as part of the Quantitative Methods Working Group at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

The workshop will last approximately 5 hours and involve a mix of hands-on development of web surveys on three platforms (Google Forms, Survey Monkey, and Qualtrics), a discussion of online recruitment methods - including crowdsourcing platforms (Amazon Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower), online advertising, Google Consumer Surveys, and professional online panels (YouGov, SSI, and GfK) - and a discussion of various issues in online survey experimentations related to mode effects, randomization, response rates and biases, and sample representativeness.

Slides for the workshop are available here.

Some examples of html forms are here:

• Example from talk
• Capturing browser features
• A simple form example
• An example of linking to MTurk
• An example of javascript randomization
• An example of a javascript redirect
• An example of a youtube video include

The course will use several online applications, all of which require registration. While participants do not need to register for all of these services, it may be helpful to register for at least some of them so that the hands-on activities are more engaging.

Participant Recruitment Platforms

• Google Consumer Surveys
• Amazon Mechanical Turk
• Crowdflower
• Prolific Academic

Survey Tools

• Google Drive (free account; unlimited surveys and respondents; no randomization)
• SurveyMonkey (free account; limited surveys and respondents; no randomization in free account)
• Qualtrics (free account; limited surveys and respondents)

Server-side technologies

• Otree (free download)
  • Download and installation instructions
  • Requires Python 2.7 and pip
• Heroku (free account; limited traffic)