User:Hartford36

CivicPanel is an on-line public opinion panel for conducting citizen surveys on issues related to government, public affairs and the community. There are currently over 18,000 on-line panelists. The panel was created by Professor Gregg Van Ryzin of Rutgers University with grant support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

As a volunteer panel, CivicPanel relies in a nonprobability sampling methodology. As a result, studies resulting from the panel are subject to self-selection error. The panelist may include a self-selected group of participants with motivations, characteristics, and learned response behaviors that otherwise might have not been present if the sample was taken with probability sampling techniques. However, it is possible that a diverse source of panel recruitment may help attenuate such bias or that the propensity to volunteer for the panel is statistically unrelated or only weakly related to the attitudes or other substantive variables instead. Several studies on on-line panels have demonstrated that they can produce estimates of attitudes and behaviors similar to telephone and other probability sampling methods, although sometimes these similarities depend on the use of weighting schemes and adjustments for mode effects.

The CivicPanel project began in 2003 as a pilot project to recruit and survey a panel of adult residents of New York City and the nation. Initially housed at Baruch College, City University of New York, the project received a planning grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2003 and renewed funding in 2005 that allowed the project to improve its Web site, acquire more sophisticated software, employ a research assistant, and actively recruit panelists and conduct citizen surveys. In 2005, the project entered a partnership with QuestionPro.com, a Seattle-based company with an integrated on-line panel management platform. The project is currently housed at Rutgers University, School of Public Affairs and Administration. The project has conducted some 25 surveys since it began, many in cooperation with various nonprofit and academic organizations in New York and the nation. Some of these organizations and the topics of the surveys include Citizens for NYC (on neighborhood quality of life and local emergency preparedness), Council on the Environment for New York City (on neighborhood noise), Gotham Gazette (on recycling), InsideSchools (on public schooling), National Civic League (on public interest in performance measures), New Yorkers for Parks (on public parks and beaches), Park University's International Center for Civic Engagement (on social entrepreneurship), and Rutgers University's School of Public Affairs and Administration (on transparency in local government). Several of these surveys have been repeated at regular intervals over the years, such as the neighborhood quality-of-life survey, the parks survey, and the noise survey. Data from the project also have been used for several academic studies about local government performance, including the development of indices of overall citizen satisfaction, modeling the processes citizens use to form satisfaction judgments about municipal services, exploring the determinants of public demand for local government transparency, and the use of importance performance analysis for interpreting subjective public service ratings.

References:

Braunsberger, K., Wybenga, H., Gates, R. (2007). A comparison of reliability between telephone and Web-based surveys. Journal of Business Research 60(7), 758-764.

Duffy, C., Smith, K., Terhanian, G., & Bremer, J. (2005). Comparing data from on-line and face-to-face surveys. International Journal of Market Research, 47(6), 615-639.

Malhotra, N., & Krosnick, J.A. (2007). The effect of survey mode and sampling on inferences about political attitudes and behavior: Comparing the 200 and 2004 ANES to Internet surveys with non-probability samples. Political Analysis, 15(3), 286 – 324.

Schillewaert, N., & Meulemeester, P. (2005). Comparing response distribution of offline and on-line data collection methods. International Journal of Market Research, 47(2), 163 – 178.

Thomas, R.K., Krane, D., Taylor, H., & Terhanian, G. (2006, July). Attitude measurement in phone and on-line surveys: Can different modes and samples yield similar results? [Abstract]. Paper presented at the Joint Conference of the Society for Multivariate Analysis in the Behavioral Sciences and the European Association of Methodology, Budapest. Available at http://smabseam2006.talk.elte.hu/klm-vv.htm#conv, accessed September 28, 2008.

Van Rizyn, Gregg. (2008). Validity of an on-line panel approach to citizen surveys. Public Performance & Management Review(32)2, 236 – 262.