Since 2012, Vasja Vehovar coordinates annual events "Web survey day" (WSD), organised by the research group of the Centre for Social Informatics. The target audience of the events are professional public as well as other web survey users who are interested in the stateof- the-art advances and trends in the field of web survey methodology. Events consist of presentations by researchers from the research group and leading experts in the field from abroad. Among the latter, talks were given by Mick Couper, Jon Krosnick and Mario Callegaro. The events also consist of workshops intended to foster a transfer of methodological knowledge into practice. The events are each year attended by 200–400 participants from academic, governmental, and private research institutions and other web survey users. During the implementation of this project we carried out three WSD events (2014, 2015 and 2016) and started with the organisation of WSD 2017.
F.18 Transfer of new know-how to direct users (seminars, fora, conferences)
Vasja Vehovar and his team develop an open-source web survey software tool for online data collection OneClickSurvey (1KA). The platform serves as a tool for conducting own research experiments and is also freely available to external users. It has more than 44,000 registered users, and annually annually two millions filled questionnaires are collected. It also provides specialised modules for general data entry, telephone and face-to-face surveys. The software includes pilot technical solutions for adapted presentation of questionnaires on mobile devices and supports the collection of a wide range of paradata that can be used to monitor the quality of the question answering processes at the level of individual respondents. Based on this project three specific modules were developed: integrated data quality evaluation (Paradata, Item nonresponse, Usable respondents, Text analysis, Speeder index, Validation statistics), questionnaire word frequency module and advanced module for integration with qualitative data collection (TAWK).
F.15 Development of a new information system/databases
Ana Slavec, PhD, participated at international conference QDET2 (International Conference on Questionnaire Design, Development, Evaluation, and Testing) that took place in Miami (Florida, USA) in November 2016 and was organised by ASA (American Statistical Association). Within invited lecture “Pre-testing survey question wording using linguistic resources: the case of low-frequency wordings« she presented a new approach to evaluation and improvement of survey questionnaire, based on linguistic resources, such as corpus linguistics and lexical databases. Ana Slavec, PhD, also mentioned ARRS and this project as a co-financer.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 1540049860The WebSM.org website was established in 1998 by Vasja Vehovar and Katja Lozar Manfreda. It was further developed by a project funded by the 5th EU Framework Programme (2003–2005). It is internationally recognized as the main information source on the methodology of web surveys and other survey approaches based on modern information-communication technologies. It offers a specialized bibliographic database of publications from this field, list of software solutions and services for implementing surveys, list of scientific events and other information relevant for survey methodologists and users. The website is visited by users from all over the world. The leader of the project continuously coordinates development of portal and inclusion of new relevant information. The key development activities on the portal in the last three years include development of new criteria for publication coding, research on networks of authors in the field as well as a pilot application of text mining algorithms for automated classification of included papers. During the project the questionnaire structuring was implemented, where a comprehensive classification of web surveys questions based on aforementioned conceptual development was made.
F.16 Improvements to an existing information system/databases
In this paper, we explore to what extent corpus linguistics and lexical databases can help improve question wording, in particular in cross-language research. We use two web surveys as case studies, the survey of international exchange students at different European universities and the WageIndicator survey on working conditions and wages. In both survey we limit only on two languages, English and the Slovenian translation. We evaluated question wordings in both surveys using language corpora and the WordNet lexical database and conducted split-ballot experiments to compare less familiar (less frequent) and more familiar (more frequent) wordings.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 33924189