Philip Sefton, Director of Client and Online Services, Division of Information Technology, Charles Sturt University, Albury, 2640. Email: psefton@csu.edu.au
John Atkinson, Senior Lecturer, School of Environmental and Information Sciences, Charles Sturt University, Albury 2640 Email: jatkinson@csu.edu.au
Online poll, validity.
The traditional paper based survey has long been used as a means to gather both qualitative and quantitative data. Such surveys can be quick to develop and easy to administer however there are a number of problems that can affect the validity of the results. In particular it can be difficult to obtain a large enough cohort willing to participate in such surveys but more disturbingly that the typical response rate may be low making it difficult to perform worthwhile statistical analysis on the data.
An alternative to the paper based survey is the use of an online survey. The online survey has the advantage of reaching a much wider cohort of people and as a result obtaining a significantly higher numbers of responses.
Similar to online surveys is the online poll. Rather than replicate a paper based survey in an online environment, a poll presents individual questions to users giving them the flexibility to respond to as many or as few questions as they choose. In comparison to online surveys, by their nature online polls have the ability to survey much larger numbers of respondents but have the disadvantage of being unable to correlate responses.
This research used the Doll and Torkzadeh (1988) measure of end user computer satisfaction (EUCS) as the instrument to compare the results obtained when administered as a paper based survey to those results obtained when administered as an online poll. The findings found that online polls do not closely compare to results obtained in a paper based survey when using continuous dependent data.
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