United States
Academic Research
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Working Paper
Survey Professionalism: New Evidence from Web Browsing Data
Working Paper, August 2024
Online panels have become an important resource for research in political science, but the financial compensation involved incentivizes respondents to become “survey professionals”, which raises concerns about data quality. We provide evidence on survey professionalism using behavioral web browsing data from three U.S. samples, recruited via Lucid, YouGov, and Facebook (total n = 3,886). Survey professionalism is common but varies across samples: By our most conservative measure, we identify 1.7% of respondents on Facebook, 7.9% of respondents on YouGov, and 34.3% of respondents on Lucid as survey professionals. However, evidence that professionals lower data quality is limited: they do not systematically differ demographically or politically from non-professionals and do not respond more randomly—although they are somewhat more likely to speed, to straightline, and to take questionnaires repeatedly. While concerns are warranted, we conclude that survey professionals do not, by and large, distort inferences of research based on online panels.
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Working Paper
Reports & Analysis
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Analysis
How Americans’ Confidence in Technology Firms has Dropped
Results from the American Institutional Confidence poll's second wave show that the public's confidence in technology, and tech companies, has markedly decreased over the past five years.
June 14, 2023
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Analysis
Latinos Who Use Spanish-Language Social Media Get More Misinformation
That could affect their votes — and their safety from covid-19.
November 8, 2022
News & Commentary
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News
What CSMaP Experts Are Watching Ahead of the 2024 Election: Part Three
From Kamala Harris memes to the nationalization of elections to election denialism, part three of our new series highlights several areas we’re looking at this year.
July 31, 2024
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News
What CSMaP Experts Are Watching Ahead of the 2024 Election: Part Two
From foreign influence campaigns to the role of WhatsApp to social media data access, part two of our new series highlights several areas we’re looking at this year.
July 17, 2024