Grant number: 849165

Survey research is the most frequently used method for collecting data in many disciplines. However, surveys suffer from several problems, in particular, measurement errors, due to human memory limitations, people making mistakes, or unwillingness to do the required effort to answer properly. In addition, more and more people are connected everywhere, all the time. In this frame, new measurement opportunities have arisen that can help reduce measurement errors but also enable the study of completely new research questions.

The main goal of this project is to investigate how new measurement opportunities can help get more accurate and/or more complete insights, which, in turn, will help key actors (e.g., politicians, firms) make better decisions. This is a new research area in which very little is known, even if these opportunities are already there: some of the new data are already being collected massively (e.g., passive metered data).

Nevertheless, researchers do not know yet how to properly use these new data. They are missing the tools and knowledge that would allow them to take advantage of the huge amount of information already collected and stored, and to integrate new measurement opportunities that a large part of the population in Europe is currently using in everyday life (voice input, visual data sharing) to make surveys easier for respondents and more natural, increasing data quality and respondents' satisfaction. New research is urgently needed to rethink the way surveys are implemented and provide a framework to start integrating new measurement opportunities in a proper and beneficial way. This is what this project does, by considering four types of new measurement opportunities: voice data, visual data, metered data (obtained through a tracking application or “meter” installed by the participants on their devices to register at least the URLs visited) and data collected in-the-moment (i.e., just after an event of interest occurred). This project's key objective is to develop the tools to best implement these new measurement opportunities, to improve web survey data quality, and to produce knowledge that helps other researchers to better decide when/how web survey questions can be replaced by or combined with other data.