Abstract:

This paper sheds a first light on the question whether or not the recruitment type of access panel members as well as duplication (i.e. respondents belonging to multiple panels) really makes a difference in terms of the quality of the research data obtained. A first major implication of this study is that we should not be too concerned about the fact that people join multiple panels as their quality is not inferior to people who have only joined one panel. A second major out-take we can derive from our results is that multi-method recruitment for building online panels is not a necessary condition for building a good quality panel.