Among the most striking trends in the field of survey research in the past two decades is the shift from interviewer-administered to self-administered surveys. … But the results from self-administered and interviewer-administered surveys are sometimes different. This difference is called a mode effect, a difference in responses to a survey question attributable to the mode in which the question is administered. …
Using its nationally representative American Trends Panel, Pew Research Center conducted a large-scale experiment that tested the effects of the mode of survey interview – in this case, a telephone survey with an interviewer vs. a self-administered survey on the Web – on results from a set of 60 questions like those commonly asked by the center’s research programs. This report describes the effort to catalog and evaluate mode effects in public opinion surveys. CONT.
Pew
