Advantages of On-Line Surveys
The Web provides a new medium for surveys that can be extremely effective, and offers advantages that go beyond personal interviews and tele-surveys. On-line survey technology can provide most of the benefits of one-on-one surveys while leveraging the Internet to dramatically reduce costs. On-line surveys can even mimic the conditional branching capabilities of one-on-one surveys but without the complexity, providing focused, targeted questions to different classes of respondents in a way that is completely transparent to the respondent.
Disadvantages of Off-Line Surveys
The disadvantages include very low typical response rates and the inability to provide ancillary information if a respondent is unclear about exactly what is meant by a particular question. Also, the responses must be converted from paper to a database for analysis, which can be expensive and error-prone.
