Web-Based Surveys in China

2. Literature Review

In order to review the literature on web-based surveys in a systematic fashion, we followed the following protocol. Firstly, we reviewed the literature on web-based surveys in general (i.e. without any restriction to China or other developing countries), in order to identify current practices as well as the broadly recognised advantages and disadvantages of this adaptation of the paper-based survey method (§2.1). Secondly, we looked at current data collection methods in developing countries: we considered paper-, email- and web-based surveys (§2.2). These two areas of literature were not restricted to the Information Systems or Information Management domains. We explain our search protocol in greater detail below. Finally, we focused our literature search on the specific case of data collection in China (§2.3), and the use of web-surveys in that context (§2.4). At this stage of the search process, while we searched the English language databases, we also looked at Chinese language databases, which cover publications in Chinese that are published inside China. Finally, we summarise the relevant literature findings (§2.5).