Still the gold standard in survey research? Comparing face-to-face and self-completion data collection in a repeat cross-sectional general social survey in Great Britain

Fitzgerald, Rory, Ndebele, Nhlanhla, Maslovskaya, Olga, Domarchi, Cristian, Lynn, Peter, Hanson, Tim and Comanaru, Ruxandra (2025) Still the gold standard in survey research? Comparing face-to-face and self-completion data collection in a repeat cross-sectional general social survey in Great Britain (Working papers, 6) Survey Futures: Survey Data Collection Methods Collaboration 34pp.

Abstract

Surveys aim to provide estimates of the behaviour, social conditions, or attitudes for the population they seek to represent. Since modern surveys of the general population were first established, the best way to collect high quality data was felt to be via face-to-face interviews amongst probability samples of households or individuals. However, more recently, face-to-face data collection in Great Britain has been impacted by declining response rates, increasing evidence of interviewer effects, rising costs and a reduction in the number of providers. At the same time, self-completion surveys in Great Britain offer an increasingly convincing alternative to face-to-face data collection, with higher levels of web penetration and digital literacy, zero interviewer effects, relative cost efficiency, as well as promising response rates and representativeness. Together these changes call into question whether the face-to-face method truly remains the ‘gold standard’ for surveys of the British population.This paper compares face-to-face data collection on the 10th round of the European Social Survey in Great Britain with an experimental self-completion survey (sequential web to paper) conducted at the same time, using the same questionnaire. The self-completion approach achieved a considerably higher response rate than the face-to-face survey, slightly better representativeness, a much shorter data collection period and substantially lower cost per interview. At the same time, it was found that the self-completion survey had slightly inferior data quality on some measures. The paper concludes that self-completion data collection offers a high-quality alternative to face-to-face data collection in Great Britain, potentially becoming the new ‘gold standard’ in the near future for surveys that can be conducted by web and paper modes in combination.

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Contributors

Author: Olga Maslovskaya

Author: Cristian Domarchi

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