Volunteer Panel Web Surveys in Urban Planning

Abstract

Web surveys have been adopted as a practical data collection tool notably due to their economic nature and a fast turn-around time. One popular type of Web survey bases the sample on a group of Internet users who voluntarily join survey panels. Often labeled as a “volunteer panel Web survey,” this approach is widely used in various social science studies, including urban planning. Unfortunately, its practice appears to have highlighted its benefits and downplayed its limitations. This chapter provides an overview of volunteer panel Web surveys, including their operational procedures and methodological advantages and disadvantages. Arguably, its main methodological disadvantage is lacking representativeness of the results arising from selection biases in the selected samples. A post-survey statistical adjustment based on propensity score analysis has been suggested as a potential solution. The author introduces detailed procedures of propensity score adjustment and discusses future research directions for improving the utility of the volunteer panel Web surveys.