Impact of question topics and filter question formats on web survey breakoffs

Web surveys have become increasingly popular over the last decade, but they tend to suffer from breakoffs, which take place when respondents start the survey but do not complete it.

Introduction

Surveys have been widely used in different fields, such as market research and political polling. Due to the cost concern and tight schedule, an increasingly number of surveys have been conducted online. However, running surveys on the web has some limitations, one of which is survey breakoff. Survey breakoffs happen when the respondent starts the survey but fails to complete it (Tourangeau et al., 2013). As a result, missing data are produced, causing subsequent analysis to have lower statistical power as well as potentially biasing results (Steinbrecher et al., 2015).

To address the breakoff, it is important to understand...

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