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Purpose — The paper is analysing the effect of adding a web survey to a traditional telephone-based national travel survey by asking the respondents to check in on the web and answer the questions there (Computer Assisted Web Interview, CAWI). If they are not participating by web they are as usual called by telephone (Computer Assisted Telephone Interview, CATI).

Design/methodology/approach — Multivariate regression analyses are used to analyse the difference in response rates by the two media and to analyse if respondents' answering by the two media have different travel patterns.

Findings — The analyses show that web interviews are saving money, even though a more intensive post-processing is necessary. The analyses seem to show that the CAWI is resulting in a more careful answering which results in more trips reported. A CAWI is increasing the participation of children in the survey and of highly educated. And it is offering a higher flexibility to answer after a couple of days off. The CATI is on the other hand more useful for the elderly. In addition, the CATI survey proved to be more useful for busy people and people not willing to participate in a survey at all. Young people and people with low resources who are difficult to reach by telephone are neither met on the web. Most of the differences in the response shares can be compensated by a weighting procedure. However, not all seems to be possible to compensate for. An effort to increase the number participating in the CAWI survey might increase the quality of the survey in general.

Originality/value of paper — In many countries authorities are considering how to reduce the cost of their national travel surveys. The value of the paper is to show that a combination of a CAWI and a CATI could be a good solution. Furthermore, it shows that the mixed mode could improve a CATI and therefore be the reason in itself to change methodology.

Low response rates in web surveys and the use of different devices in entering web survey responses are the two main challenges to response quality of web surveys. The purpose of this study is to compare the effects of using interviewers to recruit participants in computer-assisted self-administered interviews (CASI) vs computer-assisted personal interviews (CAPI) and smartphones vs computers on participation rate and web survey response quality.

Two field experiments using two similar media use studies on US college students were conducted to compare response quality in different survey modes and response devices.

Response quality of computer entry was better than smartphone entry in both studies for open-ended and closed-ended question formats. Device effect was only significant on overall completion rate when interviewers were present.

Survey researchers are given guidance how to conduct online surveys using different devices and choice of question format to maximize survey response quality. The benefits and limitations of using an interviewer to recruit participants and smartphones as web survey response devices are discussed.

It shows how computer-assisted self-interviews and smartphones can improve response quality and participation for underprivileged groups.

This is the first study to compare response quality in different question formats between CASI, e-mailed delivered online surveys and CAPI. It demonstrates the importance of human factor in creating sense of obligation to improve response quality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of smartphones and computers as web survey entry response devices on the quality of responses in different question formats and across different survey invitations delivery modes. The respondents’ preference of device and the response immediacy were also compared.

Two field experiments were conducted with a cluster sampling and a census of all students in a public university in the USA.

Device effect on response quality was only found when using computer-aided self-interviews, but not in e-mail delivered web surveys. Even though the computer was the preferred device, but the smartphone’s immediate response was significantly higher than the computer.

The sample was restricted to college students who are more proficient users of smartphones and have high access to computers. But the direct comparison in the two studies using the same population increases the internal validity of the study comparing different web survey delivery modes.

Because of the minor differences in device on response quality, researchers can consider using more smartphones for field work such as computer-aided self-interviews to complement e-mail delivered surveys.

This is the first study that compares the response device effects of computer-aided self-interviews and e-mailed delivered web surveys. Because web surveys are increasingly used and various devices are being used to collect data, how respondents behave in different devices and the strengths and weaknesses of different methods of delivery survey help researchers to improve data quality and develop effective web survey delivery and participant recruitment.

Purpose — This paper presents the process of creating a web-based travel survey tool. It aims to define advantages and disadvantages of using the web as a survey tool as well as explain the methodology involved while conducting online travel surveys and technologies that were used in the described tool.

Methodology/approach – This paper presents a web-based origin-destination travel survey tool that was developed to assess the potential of this medium to complement usual large-scale phone surveys conducted regularly in the Quebec province. The first tool (that was updated twice to answer to new needs — people-based regional survey and household-based regional survey) developed for a generator-based survey is presented and discussed. The paper namely describes the technology used as well as the particular functions, both for respondents and administrators that were developed. Particularities of the tools are introduced.

Findings — The experimentations conducted using the web-based survey tool reveal that the key components of the tool that influences the response rates and quality of responses are ease of use of the multiple elements on questionnaire such as maps and form fields and overall design quality of the user interface. While presentation of actual results after conducting surveys using the tool are not the main goal of this paper, some preliminary results such as response rates reveal that between 10% and 20% of the entire community of trip generators like universities responded to the person-based version and around 10% of the sampled households from the general population of a specific region did complete the household-based version.

Research limitations/implications — Web-based survey tools in the transportation domain are still new and are in need of a much larger research base to be able to generalize results and findings further.

Practical implications — The tool presented is using up-to-date technology and refined questionnaire design. In this optics, it tries to push the development of web-based travel surveys further in order to increase response rates and quality of responses.

Originality/value — This paper is, on one hand, one of the first to present a tool that was used for both a person-based and a household-based survey and on the other hand for trip generator communities as well as households sampled for regional surveys. It also presents in great detail the interface used in the questionnaire and the administration toolkit accompanying the web application.

The ubiquity of the Internet and e‐mail has resulted in a burgeoning interest in their potential for academic research. This paper summarizes the existing practices of Internet research and suggests extensions to them based on the design and administration of a large‐scale, national Web survey. These extensions include consideration of new capabilities such as adaptive questions and higher levels of flexibility and control. Lessons learned include the use of a modular design, management of Web traffic, and the higher level of communication with respondents.

An examination of the methodology and results from patron use surveys of networked electronic services at four geographically disparate academic health science libraries in the USA between 1999 and 2002. The principal fields of inquiry include demographic differences between in‐house library users as compared to remote library users by status of user; users’ purposes for accessing electronic services; how the purpose of use differs between traditional, in‐person, library services; and differences in usage of electronic resources based upon the location of users. The results of this study should help guide service decisions in academic health sciences libraries.

Business research often requires use of survey‐based techniques for data acquisition. In the past, researchers had to rely on manual methodologies for survey distribution, data entry, and analysis. These approaches were generally characterized by uncertain (often low) response rates; batch processing of collected data; protracted time periods spanning survey distribution to processed statistical results; and inability to make “mid‐course corrections”. These deficiencies are exacerbated for research on global competitiveness issues which requires international data gathering activities; however, they can be mitigated, if not completely eliminated, by the use of dynamic web‐based survey methods. This paper discusses the advantages of web‐based survey technologies with direct back‐end database interfaces and analytical frameworks, and presents illustrative results from development and use of such a tool.

There have been many attempts to study the content of the Web, either through human or automatic agents. Describes five different previously used Web survey methodologies, each justifiable in its own right, but presents a simple experiment that demonstrates concrete differences between them. The concept of crawling the Web also bears further inspection, including the scope of the pages to crawl, the method used to access and index each page, and the algorithm for the identification of duplicate pages. The issues involved here will be well‐known to many computer scientists but, with the increasing use of crawlers and search engines in other disciplines, they now require a public discussion in the wider research community. Concludes that any scientific attempt to crawl the Web must make available the parameters under which it is operating so that researchers can, in principle, replicate experiments or be aware of and take into account differences between methodologies. Also introduces a new hybrid random page selection methodology.