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With proliferation of web surveys, the relative affordability of recruitment, and increasing nonresponse in other survey modes, nonprobability methods are increasingly being considered by researchers and government offices alike. However, research needs to more fully understand how the demographic characteristics of respondents may depend heavily on the source of sample, mode of recruitment, and context of the survey experience. As a first step in exploring the potential implications of recruitment source on response quality, we use data from a web survey fielded in 2013 to compare data quality indicators in survey data from the two recruitment platforms (Google and Facebook advertisements). In so doing, taking into account demographic differences that may arise from various steps in the recruitment process, we explore the effect of demographics, device and technology usage, incentives, and recruitment platform on data quality and response strategy. Our results show differences between platforms in comparability to national benchmarks, breakoffs, completion time, nonsubstantive answers, and numeric response strategies. Importantly, some variation in substantive responses was explained by demographic differences related to mobile device usage, which varied by recruitment platform. With the use of nonprobability samples on the rise, future work should build from these results to more directly assess the role of recruitment source in data quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experienced interviewers are commonly thought to achieve better quality survey data than inexperienced interviewers. Yet few empirical examinations of differences in data quality on attitudinal questions for experienced versus inexperienced interviewers exist. In this article, we examine whether experienced and inexperienced interviewers differ in their levels of a commonly evaluated data quality measure—acquiescence—in two national surveys. We hypothesize that experienced interviewers will have higher rates of acquiescence than inexperienced interviewers due to either differential pace or differential behaviors. We find that experienced interviewers obtain higher levels of acquiescent reports than do inexperienced interviewers, even after accounting for potential differences in interviewer and respondent characteristics. These differences across interviewers are not mediated by differential pace of the interview, as measured by interview length, implying that there may be differences in interview behaviors for experienced and inexperienced interviewers. We conclude with implications for survey practice and interviewer training and monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]