their employees. If this is the case, it may become difficult to obtain high response rates and true answers to the questions asked.
Personalization may help to increase response rates in mail surveys. Therefore, this principle should also be applied to e‐mail surveys. An e‐mail to a long list of addresses does not help to create the impression of personal treatment. It is probably better to send a separate e‐mail to each selected person individually.
EXAMPLE 1.3 The first e‐mail survey at Statistics Netherlands
The first test with an e‐mail survey at Statistics Netherlands was carried out in 1998. At the time, Internet browsers and HTML were not sufficiently developed and used to make a web survey feasible.
Objective of the test was to explore to what extent e‐mail could be used to collect data for the survey on short‐term indicators. This was a non‐compulsory panel survey, where companies answered a small number of questions about production expectations, order‐books, and stocks.
The traditionally mode of data collection for this survey was a mail survey.
The test was conducted in one of the waves of the survey. 1,600 companies were asked to participate in the test. If they did, they had to provide their e‐mail address. About 190 companies agreed to participate. These were mainly larger companies with a well‐developed computer infrastructure.
A simple text form was sent to these companies by means of e‐mail. After activating the reply option, respondents could fill in answers in the text. It was a software‐independent and platform‐independent solution, but rather primitive from a respondent's point of view.
The test was a success. The response rate among the participating companies was almost 90%. No technical problems were encountered. Overall, respondents were positive. However, they considered the text‐based questionnaire old‐fashioned, and not very user friendly.
More details about this first test with an e‐mail survey at Statistics Netherlands can be found in Roos, Jaspers, and Snijkers (1999).
It should be noted that e‐mail can also be used in a different way to send a questionnaire to a respondent. An electronic questionnaire can be offered as an executable file that is attached to the e‐mail. The respondents download this interview program on their computers and run it. The advantage of this approach is that such a computer program can have a better graphical user interface. Such a program can also include routing instructions and checks. This way of data collection is sometimes called CASI. Example 1.4 describe an example of a CASI approach.
EXAMPLE 1.4 The production statistics pilot at Statistics Netherlands
In October 2004, Statistics Netherlands started a pilot to find out whether a CASI approach could be used to collect data for yearly production statistics.
One of the approaches tested is denoted by Electronic Data Reporting (EDR). It was a system for responding companies to manage interviewing programs (generated by the Blaise system) on their own computers. The EDR software was sent to respondents on CD‐ROM, or respondents could download the software from the Internet.
After the installation of the software, new survey interviews could be sent to respondents by e‐mail. These electronic questionnaires were automatically imported in the EDR environment. A simple click would start the interview. After offline completion of the interview, the entered data were automatically encrypted and sent to Statistics Netherlands.
The pilot made clear that downloading the software was feasible. It should be preferred over sending a CD‐ROM because it was simpler to manage and less expensive, too. Some companies experienced problems with downloading and installing the software, because security settings of their computer systems and networks prevented them of doing so. User‐friendliness and ease of navigation turned out to be important issues for respondents.
For more information about this pilot, see Snijkers, Tonglet, and Onat (2004, 2005).
This form of CASI also has disadvantages. It requires respondents to have computer skills. They should be able to download and run the interviewing program. Couper, Blair, and Triplett (1999) also note that problems may be caused by that fact that different users may have different operating systems on their computers or different versions of the same operating system. This may require different versions of the interviewing program, and it must be known in advance which operating system a respondent has. Moreover, the size of an executable file may be substantial, which may complicate sending it by e‐mail.
E‐mail surveys had the advantages of speed and low costs. Compared with CAI they had the disadvantages of a poor user interface and lack of adequate editing and navigation facilities. An e‐mail questionnaire was just a paper questionnaire in an e‐mail. The Internet became more interesting for survey data collection after HTML 2.0 was introduced in 1995. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It is the markup language for web pages. The first version of HTML was developed by Tim Berners‐Lee in 1991. Version 2 of HTML included support for forms. This made it possible to transfer data from a user to the web server. Web pages could contain questions, and the answers could be collected by the server. Example 1.5 shows some applicative aspects of the HTML questions.
EXAMPLE 1.5 Designing questions in HTML 2.0
Version 2.0 of HTML made it possible to implement questions on a web page. The <input> tag can be used to define different types of questions. With type=radio this tag becomes a radio button. A closed question is defined by introducing a radio button of each possible answer. See Figure 1.2 for an example. Not more than one radio button can be selected. This corresponds to a closed question for which only one answer must be selected.
Figure 1.2 A closed question in HTML
Sometimes respondents must be offered the possibility to select more than one answer, like in Figure 1.3. Respondents are asked for their means of transport to work. Some people may use several transport means. For example, a person may first take a bicycle to the railway station and then continues by train. Such a closed question is sometimes also called a check‐all‐that‐apply question. It can be implemented in HTML by means of a series of checkboxes. A checkbox is obtained by stetting the type of the <input> tag to checkbox.
Figure 1.3 A check‐all‐that‐apply question in HTML
Figure 1.4 shows the implementation of an open question. Any text can be entered in the input field. A limit may be set to the length of the text. An open question is defined with type=text for the <input>
