On 3 Aug 2006, at 09:44, <E.J.Helsper@lse.ac.uk> <E.J.Helsper@lse.ac.uk> wrote:
Does anyone know if there have been extensive comparative studies on the effects of different methodologies to measure internet or media use? What are the differences when you use interviews, diaries, or a survey?
Jonathan Gershuny's papers in IT & Society and also Social Forces deal with this to an extent. His more general work covers comparisons of time use estimates from surveys vs diaries over all topic domains (not just ICT use). http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gershuny+time+use John Robinson (Maryland) has also been active in this area for a long time. As part of a project we are currently undertaking here Paul Stoneman has written a working paper on some of these issues - including new analysis of the same longitudinal time use diary data as Gershuny but with different stats models and thus some different results. see http://www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/projects/esoctu/ He's also currently writing a new paper where he tests a number of different stats models on the same data to see if the results differ. And why. And what this means for 'interpretation' :-) If you're in Copenhagen later this month for the IATUR 2006 conference (http://www.sfi.dk/sw26297.asp) you'll get a preview. Ben ---- Dr Ben Anderson Deputy Director, Chimera, University of Essex +44 (0) 7710 187 806 http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~benander