Abstract:

The Internet is the newest methodology or mousetrap available to market researchers. Researchers disagree on how ready we are as an industry to move to on-line data collection. Questions abound about how representative the respondents we reach via the Internet are. Do we really know who our Internet respondents are? As a first step in answering these questions we conducted a side-by-side study among high-tech professionals. Respondents were randomly assigned to be interviewed via the phone or were asked to complete the survey via the Internet. Data collected by the two methods were compared and statistically tested for differences.