Electronic bulletin board distributed questionnaires for exploratory research

The use of electronic bulletin boards is increasing dramatically; they are now a signiicant source of opinion and experience-related commentary from a wide variety of people over a large range of topics. As such they are a major information resource and potentially suitable as a vehicle for questionnaire distribution. To date, there has been no formal discussion of this vehicle-a deeciency this paper attempts to address. It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of this medium, and compares it against other alternatives. We believe this comparison shows that the medium has a great deal to ooer and a wide degree of applicability, especially within the area of exploratory research. The main deeciency with the medium is that it potentially suuers from a large-scale self-selection bias. To investigate this, we have conducted a questionnaire study through this medium, and subsequently replicated it using a traditional mail distribution approach. We believe that this experiment provides evidence that, for populations without a sampling frame, the eeect is of a similar magnitude for both bulletin board distributed and mail distributed surveys. We conclude that surveys using this new medium are valid given the above restriction.