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How to weight online data
The industry thinking on weighting nonprobability surveys is changing. Most online survey software doesn’t offer weighting, and traditionally the advice has been that weighting nonprobability surveys doesn’t improve the results and can even skew the findings. A key reason not to weight is that nonresponse bias from key demographics can’t be corrected through weighting: for instance, senior citizens are underrepresented in online surveys and those who do participate differ significantly from non-responders in health, education, and engagement with technology.
Yet weighting of nonprobability surveys has been on the rise among public opinion researchers and deserves broader consideration among market researchers. Four key reasons that researchers should consider weighting:
- Weighting, done right, improves the representativeness of the results.
- Weighting forces the demographics to more closely match the market, reducing client anxiety.
- Weighting compensates for incomplete quota cells and can minimise the effects of unintentionally interlocking quotas.
- Weighting produces meaningful toplines in surveys with deliberate oversamples.
Jeffrey Henning, PRC will spell out how and when to weight your online surveys, with appropriate caveats and advice for when not to weight such surveys.