Mannheim Research Colloquium on Survey Methods: Going Online! Analyses of the New Push-to-Web Approach of the Social Survey Austria

Due to several challenges such as declining response rates, increasing costs, and the lack of interviewers, many national and international surveys are shifting from interview-administered to self-administered designs, a decision that was also adopted by the Social Survey Austria (SSA). The SSA is a general population survey collecting data from Austrians since 1986. In Addition, to own question modules the SSA also provides the Austrian data of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). Previously conducted face-to-face, the SSA transitioned to a push-to-web, mixed mode design starting in 2022/23 by supplementing CAWI with a self-administered pencil paper mail mode. Based on the first two surveys using this new design (N2023 = 1.146; N 2024 = 1.546), this presentation discusses our experiences with implementing and evaluating a push-to-web approach for general population surveys. It covers design-specific issues such as questionnaire length, incentives, and sampling, focuses on (desired) selection effects on sample composition, and explores (unwanted) measurement mode effects on (non-) response distributions, highlighting the challenges of disentangling these effects in cross-sectional designs. In addition, the possibility of heterogeneous mode effects will be conceptually discussed and empirically explored. Based on these results, possible avenues for further research are identified.

Please use this link to attend the colloquium via Zoom:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86829349377?pwd=OGdwMnV1d0hzMGRmNnhWaEdsc3VyQT09

MaRCS is a seminar series jointly organized by the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), the University of Mannheim School of Social Sciences, and GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.