Sebastian Kocar
Dr Sebastian Kocar is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Social Change in the College of Arts, Law and Education at the University of Tasmania. He specialises in survey methodology and statistics, with particular focus on web surveys and online panels. Sebastian’s research is primarily focused on investigating survey errors, including nonresponse, coverage, and measurement errors, in web surveys, online panels and mixed-mode surveys. The main objective of his methodological research is to find ways to improve the quality of data collected with various survey data collection approaches. His expertise is applied to survey research projects in different areas, such as higher education research and wellbeing.
Session
The Tasmania Project was established in 2020 by the Institute for Social Change (ISC) at the University of Tasmania (UTAS). The main aim of the project has been to give Tasmanians a voice and to gather important information that can support good decisions made by and for the community. The project uses a volunteer sample of adult Tasmanian residents, currently consisting of about 4,100 registered panellists, who participate in 3-4 online surveys a year. To date, 15 surveys have been conducted as part of The Tasmania Project.
Over time, the project used the majority of the main nonprobability sampling approaches to recruitment of survey participants, including self-selection, purposive, convenience and snowball sampling. Since April 2020, the study has been advertised across various social media, and on the UTAS and the ISC websites. At the start of the project, various other media, such as three major newspapers, digital media, commercial radio stations and television, were used to promote the research project and to encourage Tasmanians to fill out an expression-of-interest form. Also, to recruit an underrepresented subpopulation for a particular survey project in late-2020, targeted Facebook ads were used.
In 2022, we expanded the range of recruitment approaches to refresh the panel and to improve sample representativeness. We used other mailing lists, such as the UTAS student mailing list, to recruit survey participants who were invited to register as panellists at the end of the questionnaires. We also tested snowball sampling as a recruitment approach by encouraging The Tasmania Project survey participants to share an anonymous link to the questionnaire with other adult Tasmanians (such as family, friends, colleagues).
This presentation will discuss the nonprobability-based recruitment approaches used in The Tasmania Project between April 2020 and September 2022. I will also present the recruitment results of using those fundamentally different nonprobability approaches from three perspectives: recruitment outcomes (sample sizes), attrition over time, and representation bias. The cost dimension will also be briefly discussed.
Recording link: https://acspri-org-au.zoom.us/rec/share/qGI1WNCmj9G4HgixbIB8Jn77hqdoT8HQ84okW-XQOl5w7abUQaPaJZF1NddyEE0l.hkeH8YfaNKkfYrx7?startTime=1669184529000