Mannheim Research Colloquium on Survey Methods: Comparing Probability- and Nonprobability-based Recruitment for Survey and Digital Behavioral Data Collections: Establishing the New GESIS Panel.dbd Digital Behavioral Data Sample

Abstract:

Digital technologies have fundamentally changed our lives. Social networking sites or smartphone apps constantly create new spaces for social interaction and can reinforce existing social phenomena or trigger new ones. From a survey methodological perspective, new research is possible since digital technologies can map human behavior in previously unattainable detail, especially when linked with survey data.

In 2014, GESIS introduced the GESIS Panel.pop Population Sample, a probability-based mixed-mode panel open to the academic public for primary and secondary research. In 2022, GESIS took the next step to expand its data collection capabilities by setting up a new infrastructure – the GESIS Panel.dbd Digital Behavioral Data Sample (GP.dbd) – for collecting linked online survey data and digital behavioral data (DBD). A unique feature of this new infrastructure is a web tracking panel, which offers a transparent and affordable opportunity to study respondents' web browsing behavior. An important first step in implementing the infrastructure is to recruit participants into the GP.dbd, including the GESIS Web Tracking sample. This initial recruitment covered probability- and nonprobability-based approaches. Nonprobability recruitment arms include advertisement-based recruitment via the Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram and convenience sampling. The probability-based approaches utilized the ALLBUS (German General Social Survey), GESIS Panel.pop, GLES (German Longitudinal Election Study) and a register-based recruitment. In our presentation, we will provide first results about the sample composition among the various recruitment arms and selection steps, i.e., participating in the welcome survey, becoming a registered panelist, and participating in the web tracking studies.

Joint work with Joachim Piepenburg, Anna Hebel, Sebastian Stier, Frank Mangold, Judith Gilsbach, Laura Latocha (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences)

Please use this link to attend the colloquium via Zoom:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87334271501?pwd=ckZNODYxa3ViRFk1RVlrSzlrL3I2QT09

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.