GVU Technical Report Number:
GIT-GVU-97-14
Title:
Surveying the Territory: GVU's Five WWW User Surveys
Authors:
Colleen Kehoe
James E. Pitkow
Abstract:
Five years is not very long on most historical scales, but for the World
Wide Web (WWW) it constitutes a lifetime. A question almost as old
as the web itself is, "Who is using it, and for what?" One way to
answer this question is to use paper surveys, telephone surveys, or
diaries which are some of the the same methods used to measure the
audiences of other one-way media such as television and radio.
However, something interesting happened in early 1994: the
implementation of HTML Forms turned the web into a two-way
medium which made it possible to contact the audience directly. To
test the viability of the web as a survey medium and collect
preliminary data on the web population, the first GVU WWW User
Survey was conducted in January 1994. Subsequent surveys have
been conducted approximately every six months. The collection of
responses from over 55,000 Web users over five surveys has given us
a unique perspective on the advances in surveying technology and
methodology and changes in the web population itself. In the following
sections, we discuss what we have learned in each of these areas.
Keywords:
World Wide Web, Internet, user surveys, demographics, longitudinal analysis
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