Presentation at Budapest Business School (06 November 2012). See the other one on qualitative methodologies separately.

1. INTRODUCTION TO ONLINE
RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES –
FOCUS ON QUANTITATIVE
Pintér Róbert
Corvinus Egyetem, Department of Information and Comm.
Ipsos Interactive Services, Client Service Director
06 November 2012

2. ONLINE RESEARCH – TOPICS FOR TODAY
 Introduction: research of online phenomena and
online research methodologies
 Online quantitative research in details

3. INTRODUCTION (REMINDER): WHAT IS
INTERNET (OR ONLINE) RESEARCH?

4. INTRO
 How does internet change internet research?
1. Internet changes the business environment, it
plays more and more important role in clients’ life,
hence it becomes in itself a research topic.
2. But research methodologies also change, internet
becomes a research tool (or more exactly: many
tools) I AM GOING TO SPEAK ABOUT THIS

5. AN IMPORTANT COMMENT BEFORE WE START
 Starting and ending point of quantitative research
methods is representativity (probability sample)
 But how could an online research be
representative?
 In online quantitative research studies quota
method substitutes representativity (and
guarantees trusted and and valid results)

6. TYPES OF ONLINE RESEARCH METHODS
 Questionnaire based (quantitative) THIS IS TOPIC
FOR TODAY
 Online qualitative: asking questions (active
methods) or observation (passive merhods)
 Software based measurement, data collection (e.g.
internet audience measurement) I WON’T SPEAK
ABOUT THIS

7. ONLINE QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

8. ONLINE QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH IS THE MOST
WIDSPREAD METHOD IN THE WORLD
ESOMAR Industry Report, 2012: 16

9. TYPES OF ONLINE QUANT RESEARCH
 Banner based or so called open research
 Client based address list
 (Access) panel based research – most common

10. BANNER BASED (OR SO CALLED OPEN) RESEARCH
 Research questionnaire is accessible via a banner
on a page (hence its name), an e-mail link or link
shared in social media
 This link is not unique: anyone can access to it and
may fill it even more than once but researcher can’t
send reminders to respondents
 Easily implementable and cost effective
 But we can’t really control the size of sample or
structure of it (long field timing)
 We don’t know who are represented by sample
 It may be a good choice: surveying visitors of a
website, involving readers of a newsletter,
background research for a thesis

11. CLIENT LIST BASED RESEARCH METHOD
 Only members of a certain list can participate in this type
of invitation only survey
 It assumes that there is a list of target group from legal
source that may be used for research purposes (rare)
 Research links are unique, hence fieldwork status may
be monitored and targeted reminders can be sent
 Hence response rate is better (compared to banner
based research) and timing is shorter
 However the size of list is the theoretical maximum of
sample size as well (which can’t be extended easily)

12. PANEL BASED RESEARCH
 The most common (thanks to the limits of other methods)
 Predictable and trusted design
 Beforre invitation to a research questionnaire respondents
register to a research panel
 In this registration process they fill the registration form that
can be used for targeted invitation later
 Panel members accept that they receive research invitations
in the future and also accept both the panel and data
protection rules
 Why to register: incentive, curiosity, to be heard, access to
results
 However panel members see more research questionnaires
than traditional face to face respondents

13. TYPES OF RESEARCH PANELS
 Access panel vs client panel
 General vs special panel
 Research panel vs research community
 A rare approach: probability panel

14. MERITS AND DEMERITS OF ONLINE QUANT
RESEARCH
 Cost effective
 Fast and flexible
 Possibility of more complex questionnaire structure
 Lack of interviewee
 Relation of target group, research topic and internet

15. WHEN WE MAY CARRRY OUT AN ONLINE QUANTITATIVE
RESEARCH?
 Target group is available on internet
 Target group is both available in panel and capacity
of panel (or list) is enough to reach the requested
sample size
 No need for a sample which representative for the
entire (online and offline) national population
 Research topic and internet use has no significant
connection
 Research questionnaire is not longer than 20-30
minutes.

16. DIY: ”DO IT YOURSELF” RESEARCH
 Availabe research method for laymen
 For a good online research you don’t only need
infrastructure (e.g. questionnaire software) but
professional knowledge and experience
 Procedures by professionals:
1. Preparing questionnaire
2. Data collection (right sample is the key)
3. Data analysis
Who are represented in the database?
What is the purpose of the research (e.g. preparing thesis
OR important decision making of a company)?

17. SUMMARY
 Internet has changed the research methodologies
 Nowadays online research is the most widespread
research method in the world
 Among online research methods access panel
based research is the most common
 But we can’t use online research methods at any
time
 For you as students DIY research can be the most
useful

18. QUESTIONS
 What do you think what is the impact of diffusion of
smartphones on online research?
 Does Facebook change the applicability of recent
market research methodologies?
 What do you think how we could reach the
youngsters (15-24 years old) with traditional panel
based online research?
 Why to ask people with questionnaires if we can
observe the same respondents in social media?

19. FURTHER READING
Ray Poynter (2010): The
Handbook of Online and
Social Media Research.
John Wiley and Sons.

20. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION!
Robert Pinter
Corvinus University
Department of Information and
Communication
Ipsos Interactive Services
Client Service Director
robert.pinter@uni-corvinus.hu
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