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Disadvantages and Limitations of Internet Research

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James Aniston
Disadvantages and Limitations of Internet Research

Such a large number of merits, truly unique and not inherent in any other type of sociological research, should make online polling one of the most common methods of researching public opinion. However, these methods have a number of significant limitations and disadvantages that do not allow them to be used everywhere and to replace them with "traditional" apartment, telephone and postal surveys. Some of these shortcomings can be eliminated in the near or distant future, with the rest, apparently, will have to be reconciled. For some studies, these limitations are critical; in others, they can be neglected.

The main  disadvantages and limitations of sociological research  via the Internet include the following:

Sample offsets

1)  Lack of representativeness... One of the most serious problems of Internet research is that the sample made up of users of the World Wide Web is not representative of the general population - the inhabitants of the region under study as a whole. As shown earlier, in the second chapter, the socio-demographic structure of Internet users is fundamentally different from the structure of the Russian population as a whole: it is dominated by men, youth, people with higher education, specialists, well-to-do citizens, residents of large cities. More or less free access to the Internet is now available only to about 10% of the country's population. Obviously, the results obtained on the basis of a survey of these citizens will differ markedly from the opinions of the rest, therefore the magnitude of the systematic measurement error is extremely high here.

Thus, the political preferences of the Internet audience are fundamentally different from the preferences of the population as a whole, so there is a high probability that the opinion of Internet users on other important issues will not coincide with the opinion of all Russian citizens.

2) The  spontaneity of the sample. As a rule, a questionnaire posted on the Internet on a website or sent by e-mail is answered by volunteers - that is, those citizens who want it themselves, who are interested in the topic of the survey - the most active and curious Internet users. Thus, the most commonly used sampling method is the “self-selection method”. This further complicates the ability to control the correspondence between the sample and the general population.

There is no way to track individuals who have read the questionnaire but, for one reason or another, did not complete it. Nevertheless, it should be noted that at present, even in face-to-face polls, the number of refusals to participate in interviews has increased so much that it accounts for more than half of all requests from the interviewer. Therefore, even here it is difficult to speak about any representativeness of the data obtained.

3)  Reach the audience. Even if we defined the general population of our survey as Internet users and are not interested in the opinion of other citizens, we can get biased results. Here, the danger of bias in the sample lies in the possibility of narrowing it down to a part of the audience of any one site on which the questionnaire is posted (unless, of course, we are not talking about the formation of any specific sample).

There are several ways to avoid these misalignments. A. Zhichkina mentions three of them: 1) conducting research on a site with a fairly wide audience (large Internet portals, free postal services or search sites), or 2) placing the questionnaire on different sites with different audiences, or 3) banner advertising of an ongoing poll (as well as announcement of the study in other media - press, radio, etc.).

4)  Mobility, variability of social space on the Internet . New people constantly come to forums, teleconferences, chats, while some of the old participants leave for a while or forever. Frequent change of email addresses leads to the fact that a person can be lost.

 Thanks https://buyvotespoll.com/ for information 

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