Speaker
Dr
Frank Liu
(National Sun Yat-Sen University)
Description
Conventional practice of public opinion data collection is conducting face-to-face or telephone surveys. Recently scholars have turned to online survey for reducing cost and increasing efficiency. The problems of collecting public opinion data online, however, are that (1) data quality cannot be assured, that (2) respondents may not like to be (re)contacted, and that (3) panel data where respondents are willing to be re-contacted are stored privately. This paper demonstrates a practice of how an online-survey data collection platform overcomes these challenges. Since 2012, the platform smilepoll.tw has been serving as the only one public, open-data survey platform that provides respondents full datasets, which are released to their account right after the survey period. This transparency, as well as other practices of trust building, provides researchers a new tool for both qualitative interviewing and quantitative analysis. This paper will also give an example about how such publicized survey data help exploring attitudinal and behavioral patterns among the respondents. Social scientists in Taiwan are empowered with a resources of pattern recognition and theory formation.
Primary author
Dr
Frank Liu
(National Sun Yat-Sen University)