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Mixed-mode Weekly National-wide Survey in Russia

Yulia Baskakova (VCIOM)

Keywords: Measurement issues

Abstract

Face-to-face interviews in households remain the main way to conduct public opinion polls in Russia. This method has lately become the subject of strong criticism based on several grounds: declining response rate, shortcomings of quota sample, arguable quality of field work. Switching from PAPI to CAPI has a limited effect and rather brings to light new quality issues than gives solutions to known problems. In the same time telephone and internet polls are gaining popularity.
The presentation is aimed to compare data from a yearly experiment when a weekly national-wide omnibus survey was conducted in mixed mode. We started with combination of face-to-face interviews and telephone polls and conducted several experiments to explore ways to include online polls into the combined model. For each method we used a separate nation-wide representative sample, that allowed us to compare political preferences and some social attitudes as well as look for a way to combine the advantages of different methods and reduce error.
The report focuses on how the survey mode influences the data on electoral and social topics. We examine different types of questions and ways to explain present mode-derived differences in data. Different approaches to combine the data will also be discussed.