Vera Toepoel’s practical, how-to guide to doing surveys online takes you through the entire process of using surveys, from systematically recruiting respondents, to designing the internet survey, to processing the survey data and writing it up. This book helps students and researchers in identifying possible strategies to make the best use of online surveys, providing pro’s and con’s, and do’s and don’ts for each strategy. It also explores the latest opportunities and developments that have arisen in the field of online surveys, including using social networks, and provides expert guidance and examples of best practice throughout. Suitable for those starting a research project or conducting a survey in a professional capacity, this book is the ideal go-to reference for anyone using internet surveys, be it a beginner or a more experienced survey researcher.

### INTRODUCTORY CASE: Fitness club

A fitness club wants to conduct a Web survey and investigate how many people have lost weight since becoming a member. The fitness club has 8000 members and wants to take a simple random sample to ensure that the results of the survey are representative for all their members. They tolerate a 5 per cent margin of error (confidence interval) and want to be accurate in 95 out of 100 cases (probability level). They conducted a pilot study using 30 members and 10 out of 30 members reported to have lost weight. Their estimated sample size for the general survey is:

$\frac{{1.96}^{2}\left(.30×.70\right)}{{.05}^{2}}\phantom{\rule{0.5em}{0ex}}=\phantom{\rule{0.5em}{0ex}}323$

They fielded the survey to 600 members and got a 50 per cent response rate (300 cases). Results show ...