Abstract

Abstract The outbreak of COVID-19 has sparked a sudden demand for fast, frequent and accurate data on the societal impact of the pandemic. This demand has highlighted a divide in survey data collection: Most probability-based social surveys, which can deliver the necessary data quality to allow valid inference to the general population, are slow, infrequent and ill-equipped to survey people during a lockdown. Most non-probability online surveys, which can deliver large amounts of data fast, frequently and without interviewer contact, however, cannot provide the data quality needed for population inference. Well aware of this chasm in the data landscape, at the onset of the pandemic, we set up the Mannheim Corona Study (MCS), a rotating panel survey with daily data collection on the basis of the long-standing probability-based online panel infrastructure of the German Internet Panel (GIP). The MCS has provided academics and political decision makers with key information to understand the social and economic developments during the early phase of the pandemic. This paper describes the panel adaptation process, demonstrates the power of the MCS data on its own and when linked to other data sources, and evaluates the data quality achieved by the MCS fast-response methodology.

Highlights

  • Social surveys have been around for many decades and are conducted all across the world (e.g. Schnaudt et al, 2014)

  • We demonstrate the power of the Mannheim Corona Study (MCS) data in terms of three aspects relevant to the research community assessing the impact of the pandemic on society: (1) drawing inference to the general population on a daily basis, (2) augmenting MCS data with official COVID-­19 statistics, and (3) augmenting MCS data with prior and subsequent German Internet Panel (GIP) data

  • If instead of looking at daily response rates among the people who were invited to the MCS, we examine the share of MCS respondents among all people who were ever drawn into the GIP gross samples, we can conclude high stability, albeit at a much lower level

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Summary

Introduction

Social surveys have been around for many decades and are conducted all across the world (e.g. Schnaudt et al, 2014). KEYWORDS COVID-1­ 9, data collection, data quality, online panel, probability sample, social statistics

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